A Place, Now and Then

    At the registrar's office at York University, I am waiting for three copies of my old academic transcripts. The place is so quiet and mellow compared to how I imagined it before. And I realize that York has acquired quite a few new buildings.
     I am most impressed by the way York is looking more modern lately, even though it also looks a bit 'under construction' recently, especially with the new promised subway extension.
    There is something about being in a place where I used to study, and revisiting it after almost twenty years have passed. It is a strange feeling to know that, with all the new people here, this is not the place I knew before. It may be the same plot of land and some of the same buildings, but everything else has changed. Many faculty have moved on. I even heard that one of my favorite professors who recently retired had passed away. I feel sad but at the same time I knew from his obituary that he was not just an academic: he lived a full life and cultivated many friends among his students, in addition to being a practicing therapist as well.
    It interests me that somehow, I have never really and fully inhabit 'real spaces'. What I mean by this is: I reflect on how much my being in one place was influenced by the thoughts that were going on in me at the time. I wasn't just seeing buildings at York twenty years ago, when I was first an undergraduate. Rather, I was seeing hopes, dreams, daydreams, fears, disappointments. I was seeing Kant, Plato, Nietzsche, Christianity. I was wrestling with what I thought was true and getting stuck on what may not have been true at all. It's funny how, in all that time, I perhaps wasn't fully there. I might have been caught up in these thoughts.
   My undergraduate years at York were a time when I was trying to figure things out, such as meaning of life, ideal society, ethics, and how to think and analyse information. But I found that I lacked the experience to know when something was worth figuring out and what was worth leaving behind. Experiences such as work or social life can pull us away from these ruminations and lead us to realize that the real life is happening between people and within spaces, not in these spinning thoughts. But it's important to have confidence in oneself to be able to fully venture into those spaces, and that can be hard to come by.
    If there is one thing I could have done more of at York, I think volunteer would have been a good answer at the time: it would have helped me feel more socially connected at the time and less caught up in theories and abstract ideas. But in retrospect, I have no regrets about my years at York, and I think  of it as a time when I was trying out new ideas and developing a few writing skills as well.