Friday, March 29, 2024

Homecoming is a time to reflect about U

Last Sunday, I had occasion to return to campus from Cincinnati, jewel of the Ohio River. On the way back, I stopped by my house, just a stone’s throw from I-75 once it winds its way into Michigan.

Not all moments are made equal. The hurried, hunger-sating moments of pizza inhalation directly following my arrival at home - those are one thing. The moment I saw a new picture on the wall, a photo of my early childhood home - that’s something else entirely. Some moments - like the latter - seem more significant: There can be a universe in an instant. How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? How much can happen in a moment?

At that particular moment, I had a sudden, staggering sense of unity, of simply being at a point on the larger pattern of my life. In what can be an elusive experience when you’re changing your major every six weeks and not getting much sleep, I felt very much like me. It was neat - about a nanosecond long, but neat. That’s homecoming.

Clearly, I’m not talking about parades and football games, here. I’ve got a new definition for homecoming and I think it is more generally useful than the normal one with the marching band and the queen and all that.

So, here’s my definition: A homecoming is a moment when you stop to think about who you are, who you used to be and who you ought to become.

It is a moment, just a moment, when you can find your center, let your inner compass align itself to life’s magnetic north and make sure you’re facing the right direction. At homecoming, everything is clear. You realize that the class you hate doesn’t really matter, that you’ve got to make time for the things you love and that so much depends on the crappy handmade birthday card you got from your friends this year. Gap khakis and grade-point averages mean nothing at homecoming. Letters from friends and old lullabies mean everything.

It cannot be more than a moment - you can’t live that way, after all, always evaluating and second-guessing, always wondering if you’re doing the right thing. But for that moment, that blink, or breath or fleeting glance, you can stop and look around and see where you really are and why you’re there.

This sounds like a lot to pack into a moment, but it’s not like you sit down and make a list. There’s no 1040-H form to fill out and process. Homecoming is, I think, very different from our usual way of thinking. It is a chance to glimpse the kernel of a life - the thesis of a human essay - in a purely intuitive way. Albert Einstein said, “The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the level of thinking that created the problems.” I used to think that meant you have to think in more complex and subtle ways - to go higher, in other words - to solve problems. But maybe that’s not the case. Maybe you can, instead, go simple, or deeper. Maybe that’s what happens during a homecoming. You dive through all the boring stuff, the stress and uncertainty and those impulses to make lists to the core of what’s important.

OK, maybe all of that sounds really weird. Maybe you can’t understand what a homecoming moment is unless you’ve had one, or maybe you can’t have one until you understand what it is. Either way, be aware. They strike unexpectedly and are quickly gone.

MSU’s Homecoming doesn’t come so unexpectedly, being on the calendar. It is also an entire weekend, not a moment. All that taken into consideration, I think it can still have much of the same value as a personal homecoming. For a university, a homecoming should be two things. First, it should be an evaluation of where we, collectively, are. Though there are many things that bring alumni back, I think one of them is the simple desire to see how MSU is doing - to see what has changed and what hasn’t. “How are things at our alma mater?” they ask and then usually follow up with, “Cool, let’s celebrate.”

Second, homecoming should be a reckoning of course. We must take measure of the moment and figure out where we’re going. This time around, there are many vectors - ah, calc three memories - to consider: the near-exponential growth of the study abroad program, a recent spate of student publications on campus, the thoughtful retooling of Residence Life, a burgeoning activist community and a new emphasis on the understanding of science, for starters.

The sum of those vectors is our direction as an entire university - that’s difficult to calculate, but worth doing. My back-of-the-napkin estimate: MSU is pulling into the passing lane of the institutional interstate and is about to put the pedal to metal. As long as we keep our gas tank full - increase faculty salaries - come on, stay with the analogy, here - we’re in for a wild ride in the years ahead. But where’s that ride going to take us? Where should it take us?

I often glance from the skeleton of the soon-to-be Biomedical and Physical Sciences Center to the trees in the center of the roundabout at Bogue Street and Shaw Lane, which blow in the wind as the life of the university whips around them. Sometimes, when I do, I have a sort of homecoming moment for MSU. I get a strong sense of age and potential. I get the feeling of simply being at a point on the larger pattern of the university’s life. What the thesis of that life is, I can’t say exactly, but I’m pretty sure it has something to do with the applications of science in society, the powerful idea of community and trees blowing in the wind. That part about trees is really important.

If you participate in the parade today and the revelry and the fireworks afterward, see if you can wrangle a real homecoming out of the deal. As you stand under the lights on the IM Sports-East field, jostling with thousands of other Spartans, ask yourself: How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? How much can happen in a moment?

Robin Sloan is a State News undergraduate columnist whose column appears every other Friday. He can be reached at sloanro1@msu.edu.

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