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I want everyone to enjoy their spring breaks. Let’s take a breath, open our eyes and come back healed and rejuvenated. More importantly, let’s return safe. The community of Orono has been rocked with violence and tragedy this winter, which I hope doesn’t continue.
As a fresh transfer to the University of Maine last year, I was concerned. Originally from this area, I did not want to come back to the same university the majority of my high school attended. It was thousands of students smaller and the campus was acres larger than my old school. Fall snuck up after my summer working in Bar Harbor; UMaine was this giant, impending, gray obligation. I worried UMaine would be boring and culturally deprived — snobby, I know. After a few weeks into my first semester, my perception changed.
What I first noticed was the genuine desire to help — all my paperwork issues, financial aid questions and basic directional dilemmas were solved with ease and care. My next realization was how close UMaine students are, despite the undergraduate population of about 9,500.
The string of violence portrays a pattern of disregard for our camaraderie and safety that needs to stop. We need to reconnect with ourselves and fellow Orono residents to evaluate what is important. Homework, midterms and theses may command primary attention and dictate much of our semester-to-semester lives, but we must increase our scope of awareness of both self and others. We must sift through what matters. This is not a warm, coddling suggestion, but rather a call for introspection-based awareness.
Although the stale command’s message is in the right place, “Do what makes you happy” is a poor excuse for advice. People don’t do what makes them happy because they do not actually know how to do so. Many of our graduates this year will either be moon-eyed idealists plotting to change the world or stark realists, clinging to whichever job offer they may secure, disregarding personal fulfillment.
The solution lies in compromise, as it often does. In order to be realistic yet fulfilled, doing what makes you happy is the right idea, but the key is how to do it. You need to find out exactly what does make you happy and why. You need to discover who makes you happy and for what reasons. You need to displace yourself from anxiety and trivial concerns.
This winter in Orono, I have felt as if I were in some cursed land with cartoon storm clouds and thunderheads looming overhead, police car lights flashing, flames roaring and tears flowing. We have all been impacted. We naturally turn inward, thinking of ourselves and those we love most. Instead, we need to climb out of our “self-holes” and scrabble toward a higher order of awareness. Use the anxiety, sadness and confusion to confine the definition of what your most “importants” actually are.
These events sadly and indiscriminately strike places and people we don’t think about every day. Far-away tragedies are felt and sympathized with, but not on visceral, next-door levels. From the individual to the commercial, Orono has supported its fellow members in meaningful ways through these trying times.
A two-week reprieve is approaching. Some of us will not be able to remember this break upon returning, while others will watch it slip away, trying to get ahead in schoolwork. Some will travel, some will volunteer. Others will relax with friends and family.
Whatever it is you will do, I hope you do it well. Enjoy your spring break and come back safe and happy, ready to embrace your community and the rest of your semester.
Maddy Glover is a senior childhood development student.
