Alice in April

The end is nigh, but the winter is over. It seems like during the winter people hibernate, resurfacing only with the first rays of that timid sun. A couple of weeks ago, I volunteered at a CARES event beautifying a park in Queens. Needless to say, the day was cold, too chilly for a day of picking up trash in a relatively clean park. It was nice though to see other alumni, from consultants to bankers (no surprise there), getting involved to get their monthly dose of community service. I met a couple of younglings just like myself who are exploring the city in hopes of finding some sense of direction. These past couple of weeks, I have come to accept the uncertainty of each particular path, each one of which we have to complete in our minds. There are so many corners in the city just like there are so many possibilities, each one obscured after so many calculated steps in our minds.

It is not hard to imagine that this draws me to another metaphor, the one of life being like a chess board. I know it sounds extremely nerdy, but I have been playing it a lot with my girlfriend. It is a healthy, competitive past time that we use to talk about our days while keeping our minds and love life active. Sound corny. You bet, but it is interesting the way in the game you have to envision the moves not only you will make but also the ones your opponent will make. Although I admit that in life there are no real opponents except idleness and pessimism, one does have to envision at least minimally the way each move will play out, taking into account a certain degree of uncertainty and surprise. It is strange to think of it in these terms but perhaps Lewis Carol’s imagination in Through the Looking Glass was not too far off.

At this point in the fellowship, I have created options, a different set of possible moves, and it is a matter of which I think will get me to a given goal. That goal of course is subject to change, unlike the game, but it is important to stay true to it when you have an interest. It is too easy to fall into the trap of doing what every other Princetonian does because let’s face it who doesn’t want to make money? Saving the world is fun while we are ‘kids’ in college, but after one has to think about food, the bills, the future. Perhaps, I have always been an oddball, an outsider even to the Princeton world, something that makes it easier to define my own space, albeit one not entirely free from the pressures of family and peers.

So here I find myself, like Alice, a little older than when I started and tumbled down the rabbit hole, only now staring at a board full of different possible moves, reminding myself that at this point in the game, no decision is too egregious. I have grown wiser; this much is true, but I have also learned to revel in the endless towers that remind me of ivory pieces, bastions representing your options and what you want to avoid. This discourse, if it can be called that, seems hackneyed enough so I will end here on a positive note. Undoubtedly it is what happens as your draw closer to your goal that makes the journey, not that end, which as Eliot once put it might not be what you imagined it to be. Oh that I shall find that Ithaca is without question but that it, just like I, will be changed is the only certainty I can accurately calculate.

P.S. I have been writing short stories now in the city in hopes of building up to a novel. Creative life persists after Princeton.