Timelessness

I was walking across campus this morning - I had to take something to one of the offices across campus from my building.

(I kind of welcome that, the opportunity to get out of my office and walk a little bit.)

It was a nice fall day, a little overcast. A lot of leaves have come down already, though more because we've had such a long dry spell than because it's gotten very cold yet.

The mockingbirds were singing a little - not as much as they do during their breeding season, but I could still hear them calling a little. And I could hear the jays squawking as they foraged for acorns under the big oak trees.

I could also hear the marching band practicing off in the distance.

And I felt a sense of peace and timelessness. I could close my eyes (so I didn't see the cars and the way other people were dressed) and I could imagine myself in 1958 or 1978 or some time in the past.

And you know, that's partly why I like college campuses. There's a feeling of continuity about a lot of them. A feeling of almost being a little insulated from what's going on in the outside world.

I suppose a lot of the comfort I have on campuses is that I've been on them for so long. My dad was a prof when I was a kid, I used to go to campus with him sometimes to either go do schoolwork in the library or to hang out in his office. Walking across campus with him...somehow it felt right, it felt like a college was where I belonged. All of the things related to it - the football games on crisp fall Saturdays, hearing the marching band, the mysterious practices of the Greek system (I am more jaded about that last, now, but when I was a kid it seemed much more funny and innocent). The bookstore. All of the students and faculty walking across campus, it all seemed so PURPOSEFUL, so much like here were all these people who knew what they were doing and why.

(Cue Brahms' "Academic Festival Overture." Heh. That piece of music always reminds me of my romantic childhood imaginings of what college life was like. It's actually considerably less romantic and sometimes not as amusing. But at its best it's still pretty good.)

Campus always felt like a place apart - on the campus where my dad taught, the crime rate was lower than the surrounding city. There seemed to be a sense of respect of it as a place of learning. And it seemed like a safe place to me - somewhere where a lot of the ugliness of the outside world didn't intrude.

Probably the fact that I was a bookish kid was a big part of that - I loved learning, I loved libraries, and I loved the idea that there was a whole institution devoted to learning. And that one day I'd get a chance to go there and spend time at one.

So to me, colleges do have kind of a timeless, insulated feel - like a lot of stuff in the outside world is sort of "checked at the door." And while I may complain about how clueless some students can be about current events - you know, not being so very plugged into the news can actually be kind of a GOOD thing, where you focus more on what you're learning and less on what's buffeting you from the outside world.

Oh, don't get me wrong - there are a lot of politically active students. There are competing Obama and McCain signs around campus. The outside world does impinge on campus life.

But there are a lot of times when you can imagine it doesn't. And I love those times. I love the feeling of being a little world apart. It's a feeling not unlike what I feel in church - where there is a bigger and more important truth, and what's going on in the outside world is a mere distraction.

Because really - to come back to campus - no matter who resides in the White House come January, there are still things that will need to be done. My students will still need to learn to calculate a t test. Or they will still need to know how to make up a life table from cohort data. Or they will need to know how to test the texture of soil. There is work to be done; there are students to be prepared for their eventual jobs. And really, by and large, no matter what goes on in the world, those things remain constant.

And there is a sort of peace and comfort in that. In knowing that I have a role to play - that I have things to do despite what is happening "out there" around me. That I can make my own little corner of the world better by striving to teach well and to be compassionate (but appropriately compassionate; tough-love when it's needed) to the students.

Once in a while I have a student come back, either from grad school or from more advanced coursework and thank me for the preparation I gave them. That makes me feel like what I'm doing is worth it, like I'm doing the right thing. (I once had a young man - he wound up having to take one of my classes twice because he just struggled the first time - he worked really hard but just couldn't make better than a D that first time - come back after he got a job and tell a class full of my students, "Now you listen to her! She can teach you what you need to know to succeed!" Ha. It still makes me smile to think of it - this big rough-tough Backwoods Boy telling the students to listen to me.)

So I walked across campus and listened to the marching band and the birds and the wind in the trees and felt peaceful and blessed that I have such a good job, a job where (on the best days) I do something that makes someone else's life better. Because I really have all I want - enough money to survive, a little free time now and then to do what I want to do, and the feeling that I'm doing something to leave this place a little bit better than it was before I got here.