by Jeffrey Bell-Hanson

(Thomas Cole: The Voyage of Life: Youth, from the National Gallery of Art)

I passed a window today as I walked across campus. At the end of my sixteenth year on the faculty here there should be little that strikes me as new along this pathway. Yet the year away on sabbatical leave has perhaps changed my perspective, and I saw in something familiar a hint of something long forgotten.

This window was inside our university center, downstairs, looking into an office that serves student organizations. Yet through that window I also glimpsed shadows of a place both familiar and distant. It was a place that I inhabited long ago. I was a student. I was very serious, and yet not so serious. I was essentially care free, though I didn’t realize it. There was very little of interest behind me then. Almost everything there was to see was in front of me, stretching off toward the bright horizon. At some point I left that place, only gradually realizing that I had gone somewhere else. Maybe I never completely comprehended its absence—or rather, mine. That’s why it was so surprising to see it on the other side of that window today.

It was just a glimpse lasting only a few seconds, and then I was again out in the crisp spring air. But it jarred me. That glimpse came with a sudden realization that I was no longer in that place, even though it surrounds me every day. And it seems unlikely that I will ever find my way back.

I walked on. I came around the corner of another building on campus, and something else sent my thoughts spinning even further back. There was an impulse sprinkler watering the lawn. Slowly and methodically it traced its circle in the greening grass: psst…psst…psst… It’s likely that the first time I ever saw or heard one of these little machines was on a college campus in the Midwest, on a lazy, gentle summer day between terms, just like this one. I was just a kid, probably trailing after my dad or my big sister who were there trying to sort out something about their student experiences. To me, then, college and the student life were themselves far off toward the distant horizon.

However improbable it had seemed a few minutes earlier that I could ever return to either one of those places, it was now clearly impossible. And in that moment of realization, my heart broke just a little. These places now belong to others. I only hope that they are inhabiting them more mindfully and with greater appreciation than I did so long ago.