Selin Hos is a current senior at Dartmouth College. In her free time she likes to ponder—often too much for her own good. Luckily, she tends to write down her musings. Here are some of her favorites.
I love you.
I mean it. It’s true.
If you are reading this right now, I love you.
I don’t know you, and it is quite possible that I will never get the chance to meet you, and yet I still love you. I love you despite not knowing anything about you, for you are you and that is enough.
It really is that simple, yet I often wonder why we deny ourselves this notion of universal love. In fact, I’m not sure that anything else in the natural world has convoluted this notion of love in the way we have. A flower does not ask to be loved, it simply exists and yet we love it so…
As with the beginning of every Dartmouth term, campus now teems with laughter and hugs as students reunite with one another after weeks or even months of separation. But I’ve found that the beginning of spring feels different from the other terms. Though spring break is relatively short, it feels like the student body comes back with a resurgence of energy and vicarious excitement.
There are times when I wonder if that’s because of the re-emergence of the sun, or if it results from some time spent away from the hustle of schoolwork. But I can’t help but feel as though it stems from something inherent about springtime. Spring just brings an air of revival, a renaissance from the dredges of the winter.
I remember a moment during this past winter when I awoke and gazed out my window towards a host of trees all freshly blanketed in white from a storm the night before. The trees themselves looked so brittle carrying the burden of the recent snowfall, as though a strong gust of wind would blow them over, snapping them in half at any second. I wondered then if I, too, looked as fragile as the trees…
Another year, another birthday.
I turn 20 tomorrow, which feels oh-so strange. After all, what does it really mean to turn 20 — to celebrate two decades of this life that I am living? Each year around my birthday I try to take some time to reflect on both the past year and the one going forward. This year, I’ve been rather inspired by the lyrics to Billy Joel’s “Vienna” and have gleaned a few pearls of wisdom from the song to take with me into my early twenties.
If 19 has taught me anything, it is that when life happens, it happens all at once. Some of the chaos is of my own doing — the parties and formals, the homework and classes and all of the rest of the activities that constitute perfectly scheduled student lives. Where things get interesting, however, is when these rigorously organized aspects of life meet those that are simply out of our control. This is where those great forces — those of love, loss, power and liberty — come into play and the dynamic between you and the world gets all the more overwhelming. And these things happen all the time: Earthquakes reduce cities to rubble, two of your friends fall in love, wars and uprisings erupt around the world and someone you love dearly passes away.
These are the things that constitute our days, the ones that give our lives their context. And there are times when it is all just too much. Much of my time this past year was spent reacting and adapting to these things that just seemed to be happening to me. And as I navigated change and loss, I couldn’t help but feel frustrated — frustrated that I had to be so deeply impacted by what is so outside of my control. It seemed like everything was an impediment on the course of the life I had already planned.
One of my favorite lyrics in “Vienna” is as follows: “Slow down, you’re doing fine / You can’t be everything you want to be before your time.” Life is just funny in that it feels like the more we try to plan, the more the universe only seems to laugh. I get the sense that maybe that’s what it is all about — that maybe there’s very little in this world that we can actually control — and yet we live our entire lives with the illusion that we do…