I’m looking around my room right now, delaying, trying to stall, not quite sure how to vocalize those thoughts that are zooming around my head. It’s been quite a day, and I guess you could place me in the world of pure sensory overload. Let me then start backwards, and we’ll see just where I end up when I’m finished.
I just came home from the first lecture of Robert Reich’s Wealth and Poverty class, a class that I have been looking forward to for basically the last six months. But as I just wrote those last words – six months – the corners of my mouth seemed to curl upwards, as if somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew that I’d been waiting for this class for quite a while longer. I don’t know what the difference is – I’ve had classes this large before. I’ve had (quite a few) classes with professors that were not only leaders, but astounding minds in their fields. I’ve had classes where the professor wrote not only our textbook, but the textbook for most of the nation’s classrooms. I’ve been here before.
But this is different. This feeling is one of terra incognita, of utmost novelty with an eerie sense of familiarity that I can’t quite place. Today I attended a class that had absolutely nothing to do with what I have devoted the better part of at least eight years of my life working towards. In fact, I attended both the discussion and lecture for a class that I don’t think I could have imagined taking even three years ago. I don’t know why that’s the case, but it is.
And as I sat there, watching Robert Reich speak about both the nuances of the class structure and the fundamentals of inequality in America, I was in an unparalleled state. It’s one of those states that you wish the English language had a word for, but later discover that only gawky combination of descriptors can do it any justice. My combination, today, was awe, deference, humility, shock, and freedom.
Awe, because before me stood one of the greatest political minds of our time. He stood, and lectured, and joked, and explained, and I simply could not believe what I was seeing.
Deference, because the man that I was looking at, regardless of past or creed, operated at an intellectual level that was unlike anything I have witnessed firsthand. Oh, and he, for at least a semester, was here to open a window for us to his world of elevated thought.
Humility, because this basically constitutes my first venture outside of not only my major, but outside of the engineering world that I had grown so accustomed to.
Shock, because although I have felt overwhelmed before on the first day of a class, in the back of my mind, I knew I at least had an educational foundation upon which to lean in times of need. This was a different story.
And finally freedom, because in this different story I am little more than a fascinated blank slate, a position that bears with it both limitless possibility and endless deluge in terms of the typical “where to go from here.”
Now that I wrote the last sentence, I’m not quite sure where to go with this post. Suffice it to say that those that know me know that I spend an unbelievable amount of time online simply learning. I search, click, and browse constantly (sometimes at the peril of me and my so-called productivity) for more information on a wide array of different (and increasingly random) topics – technology, music, politics – whatever happened to pique my interest that day, week, or month. This constant search is as often sustainedly exhilarating as it is rarely satiated, and typically results in a period of me feeling more and more overwhelmed by the sheer wealth of information that I simply do not know.
So today, as I sat there listening to Professor Reich lecture, I felt this same exhilaration as he expressed idea after idea, each filling some unbelievable gap in my education that I didn’t know I had. My first words after his lecture ended were the words I still feel right now – this is going to be an amazing semester. And as I wrapped up this post, and began to feel a little less overwhelmed by what’s going on in my own mind, I realized that I left one word off of the list above: thrill.
Thrill, because I, for the first time in a long while, feel like I am a part of something that has always been a part of me.
