I didn't spend this past spring break anywhere with palm trees. I went home and spent my break eating, sleeping and listening to \Heaven is a Place on Earth"" by Belinda Carlisle 15 times a day. That's pretty much all I wanted out of spring break. But I still felt pressure from others to be doing something bigger. And as I listened to these people, I realized that we all need a little reality check.
What bothered me was the sense of fatalism. People acted like spring break was the last chance they would ever get to have fun. Am I crazy or does that seem off-kilter? What does it say about the way we prepare to go on with the rest of our lives that we're expecting to live another 50 or 60 years without ever having as much fun as we had in the span of March 12 to 21, 2004?
Perhaps there's something wrong with the way college has conditioned us. For most of my college experience, I felt old; old to not have more work experience, old to not have had more mature romantic relationships, and old to not feel certainty about what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. But last summer, a job in the ""real world"" showed me people of all ages working hard, yet also clowning around in the same ways we do now. And what I realized is that we're far too young to feel old.
It's hard to comprehend it in this town, but 21 is incredibly young. Madison is kind of like ""Planet of the Apes,"" only with young people instead of apes. We are so completely surrounded by young people that we get caught up in competition and forget how much time we have to figure out the basic directions of our lives. If the guy next to you has a 3.95 GPA and a great job lined up for next fall, be sure to congratulate him. But that doesn't speak ill of you, the 21-year-old who doesn't have the rest of his or her life planned out.
Seniors are now coming down the final stretch of their college careers, while freshmen take deep breaths in relief that they have survived perhaps the most challenging year of their lives so far. Why should we take the passing of great challenges to be the beginning of the end? Too many students seem to treat adulthood as a prison sentence, but it shouldn't be that way.
We live in a place that challenges us intellectually, while also encouraging us to have a good time. So why do so many of us act like peaking at the age of 20 is a certainty? If we really learn the lessons of Madison, we will grow into 30-, 40- and 50-year-olds who are capable of relaxing and having a good time.
We all face inevitabilities in our lives. Wisconsin will always be cold in the winter; I will always have bad eyesight; and John Mayer will always sing like Pete Sampras after a botched tracheotomy. But a terminally boring post-college life is not an inevitability to which we must resign ourselves. Spring break is the seventh inning stretch of our school year, not of our prime. We should all try to take on some perspective. Then maybe you can join me in a life of optimism and wimpy '80s pop music.
Amos can be reached at amosap@hotmail.com. His column runs every Wednesday in The Daily Cardinal.
