I thought a lot about how to reopen The Student Movement, determining my first words back to a campus of people still dazed by the past six months. As with anyone given the opportunity to share, the words after such an event seem to carry additional gravity. Being sent back home by a global pandemic, expelled from our dorm rooms by nature itself, inspired many questions––not the least being, “what is home?” For many of us, we formed friendships and relationships that provided stability amid the stresses of university. The support groups that we developed on-campus were physically separated––if not emotionally distanced. For many of us, it meant returning to our parents’ homes and reestablishing life in the towns that we grew up in. But not everything about returning home is inherently easy, rather, in some regards, university provided a type of distance and safety that home did not. Attending college changed and healed me in ways I could not foresee, and being forcibly brought back home brought back a number of painful memories.
Being in lockdown over the summer months with my parents was something wholly unexpected, and as one might imagine with such a long period of time, an experience with dramatic highs and lows. I realised more poignantly than ever how returning with minimal expectations helped lessen the blow. Even the most healthy family cannot avoid fights over who lost the TV remote or who left the others’ shoes low enough for Piper (our beloved SPCA dog) to chew them. After living in relative independence for years, returning home and re-placing yourself back into the rhythm of someone else’s life can be jarring. Nothing says “welcome home” like your anxious mutt waking you up at 5AM while still adjusting to the time zone difference. At home, I am a son, lawnmower, dog-walker, and aspiring comic; at school, a student, undergraduate researcher, and aspiring lawyer. By so many metrics, the person that I am, or at least how I feel that I am, differs between Alberta and Michigan. To this day, I struggle with avoiding reverting back to some previous iteration of myself when I return home. How could such experiences feel truly like my home?
As with many Andrews students, my home away from campus rests far away from my dormitory room––in my case, roughly twenty-one hundred miles northwest towards the Canadian Rockies. With this, the hybridity of life never really vanishes, I often find myself referencing off the opposite part of myself when inhabiting the other. It’s the simple moments of looking back across the 49th parallel, wondering when you’ll play pond hockey again or that you miss your morning Tim Hortons’ hot chocolate. When in Canada, I wondered how my university friends were doing and craved the intellectual rigor of campus classes. But it runs deeper than that; it stems from interrelations between identity and place––where do I feel the most whole? It's a question I’ve spent the last four years grappling with, and progress often feels all-too-temporary. The painful reality is that I cannot have both. At some level, I will leave parts of myself that I love behind. Oftentimes, I worry that moving away for school led to inevitably superficial relationships, with many friendships coming with an expiration date.
These questions are more tangible than when they appeared years ago; while attending high school, the dependency necessitates that you live at home regardless of difficult relationships. But with growing older and gaining independence, you may begin to choose which people should make up your inner circle. In applying for law schools across the continent, it begs consideration for what should constitute this new collective. In a time where picking up one’s life and moving thousands of miles away appears feasible, the choice carries seemingly endless implications. So many places one could hope to flourish and so many ideas for what the future could hold, all of this grounded by the reality that certain relationships and opportunities simply cannot be lost. Here, I’ve grown to appreciate the works of the early stoics, none more than Marcus Aurelius. In his text, Meditations, he penned, “To love only what happens, what was destined. No greater harmony (Aurelius, 2008)”. Aurelius grasps with lucidity how people experience anxiety from the projections they create of the future. He proposes, instead, that grounding oneself in what has been actualized limits concerns to the real. At its core, I believe that it takes genuine honesty with oneself to balance between committing yourself to your now while simultaneously imagining what you could become part of.
Work Cited
Aurelius, Marcus. The Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. Trans.
Francis Hutcheson and James Moor. Liberty Fund (Indianapolis), 2008, pp. 75
The Student Movement is the official student newspaper of Andrews University. Opinions expressed in the Student Movement are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors, Andrews University or the Seventh-day Adventist church.