By Jess Mitchell, Staff writer
One month out from gradation, and the inevitable questions start to keep us up at night:
Will I graduate on time? What if no one hires me? What if I fail my final as- signments? And the ever elusive: When can I sleep?
I feel like we have all gotten into the cycle of loading our schedules up with as much as we can so that we can define ourselves as “successful” and in the process cause massive amounts of anxiety and ailments to hit our bodies. All to put on some weird outfits and a fabric covered piece of cardboard with a string dangling from it, take a piece of paper and walk into a work-filled world with debts to pay.
I have been studying a playwright named Maurice Maeterlinck who is credited for writing plays that deal with something called “static drama.” On the stage, instead of the story of the play revolving around action, it revolves around stillness and silence. And within that silence, Maeterlinck argues that we can find a deeper sort of action: a source to our motivations, our identities, our problems. I fashioned his theory into a process:
Pull back what the silence hides, and you see what is under that, and that reveals something about us. I think a lot of what is under that silence is fear, perhaps a terror of something.
I realize that when I look at all the activities I cram my schedule with, a part of the cramming is that we place a high value on busyness because to us busyness means success. But that is a pretty good excuse to also not listen to ourselves at a deeper level.
Could we find a type of silence that hints at a subconscious desire or fear that is flailing just under the silence? If we continued down that track, could we answer questions about ourselves?
For me, my silence is the silence of unanswered questions about the future and about myself. It challenges who I am and what I do, and that is scary when I have dedicated so much time to trying to mold myself into a person for the past four years at college. Nothing seems certain beyond receiving that diploma. And maybe what I need to work on is learning to be all right with that instead of trying to create noise and busyness overtop of those fears. I hope that if I can confront the silence I can change something for the better.
I am eager for graduation and to step into a new stage of life…but not everything feels exciting. I am hoping these feelings resonate with other seniors who are perhaps struggling to understand what it means to graduate from Susquehanna.
But above all of this, let’s be proud of this milestone we are passing together. Graduation does not happen every day. We celebrate not just getting a piece of paper but the process it took to get here.