With the remnants of my freshman fall lying in the snow that blanketed Hanover, I went home tired, but still a tyro. Weeks filled with studying had passed since I learned to Salty Dog, and finals were over, but I felt as if I had not quite begun.
Within a couple of days after returning to suburban Ridgewood, New Jersey, I drove back to My Place -- Ridgewood High School. As I walked through halls filled with teenagers modeling a fusion of hair dye, flannels, noserings, and black-booted refinement, I admitted that, if nothing else, ten weeks could easily make me an outsider, however welcome.
Within minutes I was sitting in Room 222, talking to Mr. Jack McKeon, who is much too funny and crazy to be described with the words "English Teacher," so I will briefly mention that his final exam last year was primarily on the Jungian significance of the Star Wars trilogy. He began our conversation by saying, "So how's Dartmouth? I'm really interested because I always thought it was the absolute wrong place for you."
Above all else, Mr. McKeon is direct. When he asked me if I had been writing, I squirmed sheepishly and attempted to explain (rationalize) why all I had belched out was a few papers for school. I said, "Getting started is so hard. I just can't begin." He replied, "Then start in the middle."
The middle. Oh. It's an underrated noun at this time of year. We take our finals, go home to celebrate the holidays and New Year's, make resolutions, and come back to school to begin again. We pay homage to beginnings and endings, but the middle is just there -- to be ignored or sneered at. Wednesday is Hump Day, after all.
We "love" to start things, if you can disregard America's collective procrastination disorder, which I can't. We are even happier to finish them, at least until nostalgia sets in, then we dwell on "lost innocence" or "the good 'ol days."
Maybe we need to reassess the middle. It's really not a bad place to be. If you have made it to the middle of something, you have managed to conquer inertia and that terrible I-don't-know-what-I'm-doing awkward phase. If you are in the middle of something, you don't have to worry about what comes next and you don't have to reflect on missed opportunities. That stuff can come later, like when you get your grades or you graduate. The middle is a busy time, I will admit, but normally it is a time filled with purpose.
I realize nobody likes to be "caught in the middle," but this feeling of being pulled in two directions at once is really caused by our excessive commemoration of beginnings and endings. I spent the fall term so worried about how I was going to "end" things from home (namely my relationship with my boyfriend of a year) and begin my life here, that all I could see was a blank computer screen.
So I have decided: I am going to stop partitioning my life; I am going to stop believing that certain people and places must be left behind. Instead, I am going to imagine my life as a fluid, seamless space between the bookends of my birth and death. Although January may be the first month of 1997, it also lies at the center of another schoolyear that will soon spin into the past.
