Journal Entry 6/5/2014 – An Afternoon walk on WWU Campus
This afternoon, K, Fran, & I drove to Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA to listen to Nick Wees play his junior trumpet recital. It was a beautiful day, about 75F and sunny.
After dropping K and Fran off at the Performing Arts Center, I had a chance to walk back across campus from one of the outer parking lots.
On my way, I gazed at and thru the Richard Serra sculpture that drew such an outcry when it was originally purchased.The huge rusty panels stand just as they did when it was installed in 1980. Art survives.
I walked quickly by Bond Hall, where I spent so many hours ignorant of the fact that I was not a particularly gifted computer scientist.
As I passed thru Red Square it occurred to me that every college campus seems to think they invented the central square surrounded by original architecture and set off by a perpetual fountain shooting skywards.
Something else that, surprisingly, hasn’t changed much is the student body. I imagine that the demographics have diversified some and the numbers have grown, but the general college student population still consists of smug teenagers carrying backpacks, dressed in 2nd hand store clothes, sporting beards and long hair and generally grinding their lives out with an unaccounted for optimism that they will be or are changing the world. This cocky innocence is refreshing when compared with the jaded, worldly adults like myself.
As I looked past the brick buildings, the outdoor art, the peripheral streets, student apartments, and the predatory businesses, I saw hills and mountains of evergreen trees and, to the west, Bellingham bay and the San Juan Islands.
I realized that these students are optimistic because they disdain or ignore the character flaws of a society grown too comfortable with the conveniences of a first world economy. Instead, they focus on the purity and complexity of the larger environment. They operate on, almost celebrate, the surreal nature in which we live, from the intrinsic grace in every atom to the incomprehensibly large universe. Some place inside, they realize that, when all of the buildings and the cars and the roads and all of the transient sparkly diversions of society are reduced to so much cosmic dust, the fundamental structure of the world will continue as if nothing ever happened. Somewhere along the line, adults forget this.
I knew when I graduated, 30 years ago, that I wanted to live and indulge in the transcendental corner of the world called the Pacific Northwest.
I knew that it would take all kinds of crazy backflips to make this happen.
I knew that the financial barriers and, worse, the constant drag of inertia keeping me in some other situation that I chose out of convenience or immediate necessity would work to reduce this dream to a vague feeling of lost opportunity.
I knew that my entire person would span across a spectrum of events, choices, compromises, challenges, optimal and suboptimal accommodations and at times, seemingly insurmountable frustration.
I realized that these trials were necessary to facilitate my being able to walk calmly across WWU campus and feel at home with myself.
Some may say I set my expectations too low. That my accomplishments don’t deserve the self recognition I give them. But I think that this view is too narrow and misses the value I gain from seeing a life circling around and twisting like a Mobius strip, meeting a reflection of itself, and knowing that it wasn’t all due to chance, but to a deep conviction that my fundamental instincts were right.
This afternoons milestone is not terminating or limiting. It is empowering to know that I can base my future choices on the same criteria and that this will enhance the results.
Nick’s recital was awesome. It stretched from baroque to classic jazz to theater sound effects. I’m sure that, in the future, we’ll pay to hear Nick Wees play in larger, more crowded venues. When that day comes, I hope that he comes back to walk on the WWU campus on a sunny spring afternoon and I hope he experiences the same satisfaction that it is all worthwhile.
jason pryde
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