Hello blog, and happy Wednesday!
Today is a very important blog; this is my last blog of the semester!!
Now, I know what you might be thinking: Andrew, didn’t you say you were on campus for another week? Why won’t you be blogging on the 22nd?
Well, good people of the Blogosphere, I have good news and bad news for you.
The good news: I’m going home on Friday! I’m leaving six days earlier than originally planned and will be spending both my birthday and the week leading up to Christmas with my family in Iowa!
The bad news: The reason I’m able to go home so early is because cases are rising everywhere, including Wellesley College. While our COVID dashboard has never shown more than twelve student cases, that’s also the highest our numbers have been since the beginning of the pandemic. The Office of Residential Life decided that because students were so stressed about being able to go home and see their families over the break and not having to spend it on campus in quarantine, it wouldn’t be fair to keep RAs on campus until the last minute and we were given permission to leave campus early.
It’s been weird to see the shift on campus in the past week or so; everyone has gone back to wearing masks in the halls, on the way to the bathroom, even outside walking to and from class. I think there’s a familiar undercurrent of anxiety that I haven’t felt since I left campus last spring, and there’s a bit of a sense of defeat from those of us who were here last year; we had just started to believe things were really different, and then everything turned upside down again. I’m starting to get a bit motion sick.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about who I was when I first stepped on this campus. It’s been a while since I’ve mentioned the specific event that made me choose Wellesley; when I first visited the summer before my senior year of high school, I puked my guts out in the academic quad. As an extremely superstitious person- and a firm believer in gut feelings, both literal and metaphorical- I took that as a sign that this was the place where I was meant to spend my college years, and I decided to apply Early Decision. It was completely instinctual, and I stand by it. I do think this is where I was meant to be, whether I always enjoy it or not. There are so many things I’ve learned at Wellesley I never would have learned without it, and I’ve met so many incredible people here that I never would have had the chance to meet anywhere else.
It feels like ten years have passed since that first time I opened the door to Green Hall; I feel like I’ve lived so many lives since then. The world has reinvented itself, Wellesley has reinvented itself, and I have reinvented myself. Everything has changed, but my faith in things that are meant to be has remained entirely the same. Faith is what brought me to Wellesley, and faith is what I’m going to hold onto when it feels like the world is turning upside down again and again and again. I’ve never been a religious person, but I do believe in something. I’m five days shy of turning twenty, and I still regularly wish on the first star in the night sky, fallen eyelashes, and dandelions; I’m still not entirely convinced there’s not a Santa Claus. More than any of that, I believe that everything is going to happen the way it is meant to happen; what is meant to be, will be.
I took a Shakespeare course this semester as part of the requirements for my English major, and there’s a passage from Hamlet that I think pretty much sums up how I’m feeling right now. When Hamlet returns to Denmark from England, he has finally come to terms with his father’s death and his mother’s betrayal, and he says this to Horatio:
“Not a whit; we defy augury; there is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ‘tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all; since no man has aught of what he leaves, what is’t to leave betimes? Let be.”
Whatever is meant to happen is going to happen, and we just need to let it happen. Everything will be the way it is meant to be.
Sending you joy,
Andrew
P.S. Fun fact: the Hamlet quote is also where Paul McCartney got the inspiration for “Let It Be”, hence the blog title. What a small world.