Change

Hello blog dear, I've been away. I suppose that's part of being at college though, you will have to bear with me as I neglect but never forget you. So, before I get too caught up in mindless babbling, let us begin with the actual topic of this post. (Yes, half of it will probably be babbling, because that is what I do best.)

The other night I was noticing all the quotes that people had put up in the hallway of my dorm. It's interesting what you can learn about people from the quotes they select and display. To put it into a mildly sentimental sentence- you could say quotes are like windows into the soul. (See, I warned you it was a sentimental sounding sentence!) Anyway, the night I was walking past the one that caught my eye was one by Scott Fitzgerald: "It’s a funny thing about coming home. Looks the same, smells the same, feels the same. You realize what has changed is you." 

It's one of those quotes that gets you to musing. I've been thinking about how true it is, but not just from home. (Actually, I don't really find it relevant with home at all. At least, not to the point where it is worth mentioning, because home is a different story altogether.) Particularly I find this quote relevant in my relations with college dorms. I guess it stands out to me because with college there are all these funny transitions with breaks and what-not, where you are separated from what becomes your daily life, and then you are thrown back into it, and everything is the same, but so different. The things that are the same are the laundry hamper, the blankets on your bed, the pictures on the wall, but most especially the daily routine you fall into of trudging down the hall at exactly the same time every morning. Everything looks, smells, and feels the same, it's the same routine that became so habitual last semester, but even though there is all that sameness there is so much different.

It's just a very fascinating thing to think about because it's very rare that you get to have such a close observation of your own change. I feel like that is put badly, but I don't know how else to word it. See, we're constantly in a state of change, a state of growth, and whether we're growing in good habits or bad ones there is still always that sense of change. Normally we can't pick out that change in ourselves, because it happens so gradually, but with going away to school and coming back it's easier to pick out little things that you feel differently about even from break to break.

Even in our relations with other people there is that sense of change in yourself. I'm going to school with exactly the same people that I started out the first semester with back in August, and yet my knowledge of all of them is so different. This is something I've thought a lot about, because you can look back at all those first impressions you had and realize how different people are from what you first thought them at introduction. Maybe that change is in you, maybe it is them, maybe (and this is most likely) both. Oddly enough, this topic goes quite well with what we're talking about in my Philosophy of Human Nature course. We've just started to delve into talking about what constitutes nature, but one of the first things we've talked about is how something that distinguishes things that are constituted by nature from those that are not is the impulse towards change and growth.

Long story short, isn't it funny, that feeling of sameness and difference? To look at something and remember exactly how you felt when you beheld it for the first time, and at the same time be looking at it through different eyes and with different understanding.