On Returning to a Meaningful Place
“Daddy, is that where you and your friends ran around in your underwear?”?
“Um, ah, yes, Ellis, that’s where we ran across campus wearing, um, boxers one night,” I said. Maybe I shouldn’t have told my nine-year-old daughter so many stories from college before coming to campus, but at least I was wise enough to slightly edit the stories.?
“Oh wow, Ellis! Look over there, that’s where we would go to chapel and pray. Let’s go see that.”?
Last week, thanks to Rebecca Jones and Chris Babb, I was able to live a dream and come back to my alma mater, Ouachita Baptist University, to screen a documentary film and speak at a few classes.??
I stood in the middle of campus looking around at the unbelievably young-looking students rushing across lawns and under leafy trees to their classes in the stately red brick buildings. This place loomed so large in my imagination. It was so foundational to who I was as a person. It was the beginning of so many friendships. It was the incubator in which my mind was introduced to new ideas, thoughts, and experiences. It was the place that marked the junction between the child version of me and the adult one.?
I screened the film on Sunday night and did a Q and A session with students—which seems laughable to me that I am old or experienced enough to pass on any meaningful wisdom. On Monday, I came back to speak at two classes, one of which Dr. Root’s Feature Writing class played a pivotal role in the direction my life took.?
I’m going to be posting a few (probably 4, maybe 5) musings over the next few days about what it’s like to return to a meaningful place after a long time away—especially with a young daughter:?
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My grandmother told me she felt like an 18-year-old trapped in an 80-year-old’s body and I remember looking at her and thinking she was surely joking.
Yet as I walked through the campus and looked at the young students, I realized I couldn’t blend in any more. Despite the youthful glow I fancy I still emit, I wasn’t fooling them. Based on how they said “yes sir” to me and held doors open and asked if I needed help finding anything, I realized I was just another older “adult” visitor passing through their college bubble.?
In my mind I am still a college kid. I feel like I am at the beginning of my journey. I keep waiting for things to click so I will finally become a grown-up. Maybe for some people, that happens in a single moment, but for me it feels more like a gradual journey of awakening—that becomes more evident in moments like coming back to my college campus.?
There is an anecdote from the Cuban Missile Crisis when JFK’s military and political advisors were meeting to figure out what do in the face of imminent nuclear war with the Soviet Union. One of the men looked around the room and asked “Where are all the wise, old men who are supposed to make this decision?” to which another replied “We are them. We are the old men now.”?
Okay, obviously me speaking at a college feature writing class has little in common with a presidential cabinet making decisions that determine the fate of the world, but as I looked at the class of students who didn’t look too much older than my daughters, I realized “it’s me. I’m the old man now.”?
And that doesn’t actually feel as bad as I thought it would.?
Because despite the back pain and gray hair, I have wisdom and perspective I lacked as a college kid. Despite life feeling more fast-paced and in some ways exciting back in college, my life feels more full, deep, and joy-filled than it did when I was streaking around in my “boxers” late at night as a kid at OBU.?
Returning to OBU last week and seeing the college kids with their mullets, baggy jeans, over-sized T-shirts, and short shorts, helped me to realize my grandma wasn’t entirely joking … but she was humbly side-stepping the perspective she had gained with age.