Sean Has Thoughts and Writes Them Down: Beginnings are hard

Hanover in the spring is good and only gets better.

I can feel the world around me growing warmer and frankly, it makes everyone noticeably happier. In the winter, people can be downright sour. Spring, however, endows us with a sense of rebirth and renewal. And besides, so many people are back on campus after escaping to warmer climes that Dartmouth becomes literally an entirely different school.

I've been having an unusual Spring term. For the first time in my academic career, I have not attended a single class since coming back to campus.

I've woken up at 7:30 a.m. nearly every day. I've honed my blitz game and upped the Twitter output. I've had lots of time to sit and cogitate deeply about things like, "What's a better word than plain old 'think'?"

How? I'm pulling 40 hours a week as the Collis Desk Manager and rapidly accruing more small talk experience than I ever thought I'd need. I'll be writing about that in the future perhaps (let's not pigeonhole ourselves, right?) but for now, I'm taking this stuff all conceptually.

One thing I keep thinking about is how spectacularly difficult starting something for the first time can be. And when you cogitate about something at the Collis info desk, you cogitate long and hard. Trust me, there is a lot of downtime in between absentmindedly renting out frisbees and refilling GreenPrint. Here goes:

Beginnings are hard.

Middles can be difficult and often are regrettably unmemorable, and endings are infinitely hard to walk away from, but still, beginnings remain far and away one of the hardest things in life. How to convey who I am to you in the brief moment we have before paradigm-determining impressions are cemented? How to say: No, wait, this is not the whole of me, there is so much more that I only need time to show you? How to carefully pace the gradual unveiling of oneself to another? To know that all that you are and will be and want to be but cannot be understood in a minute or a week or a single conversation or blog post?

Beginnings are hard. In that fleeting instant when we stand at the cusp of something fresh, that instant before we become aware but which nearly everyone unconsciously intuits — in that passing instant, we stand at a nexus point, a crossroads (perhaps even a visible one like this view from the info desk) that, yes, will lead us down one path, but at which we cannot help but linger in contemplation of the galaxy of possibilities that causes our hearts to race and our chests to swell in that way only this particular moment can.

Or maybe this is just me?

Hi, I'm Sean and I'll be writing for Dartbeat. Come back and watch as we take it out of it swaddling clothes and it grows into a big boy blog. Don't blink! Dartbeat will be a teenager off at college writing for its own blog before you even know it.