On returning to school after a few years: DJ Summers
If you’re thinking about coming back to school, think long and hard. It’s an investment of time, of energy, of money. It taxes you in unexpected ways, like tunnel vision on a stretch of highway to a new city. You leave small chunks of yourself on the asphalt behind you while you cruise to your goal.
But if you’re tired of not thinking in your day-to-day life, coming home with an aching back and sore feet only to drown in TV, you might consider it an improvement. There’s a reason you’re not feeling especially fulfilled.
You haven’t been doing what a human is born to do, and what a university solely exists to help you do.
According to Aristotle, humans are a special kind of creature. We need rationality, reason, intellectualism, the same way the dog needs its pack and the fish needs its water. Aristotle believed a human was defined by that key exercise of thought. The thoughtless human, he said, was not a real human.
The best kinds of jobs are the ones that force us to think. The goal, both for the Greeks and for contemporary Americans, has always been to fulfill your humanity and earn a wage at the same time. The people who love their lives are the people who love their jobs, jobs that exercise their intellect in each person’s own unique way. We try to kill two birds with the same intellectual stone.
Sadly, a human can live a whole life without thinking. For example, a hypothetical person can run a pizza shop and spend nights drinking Old Crow and fighting till his first arrest. He can watch stolen HBO instead of reading the book his father mailed him. He might have graduated high school, this fictive man, and simply thought it was time to leave thinking behind.
He could work every miserable job on earth. Our hypothetical non-thinker has probably mopped up biker blood in a Utah gas station. He’s probably run a crew of felons installing lighting into Colorado red granite. He’s almost surely packed pill bottles into boxes on an assembly line, unloaded trucks over frigid Minnesota midnight shifts, gotten fired and sold his clothing to pay for six pounds of tuna and rice.
All the while, the non-thinker was undoubtedly jealous of the college kids whose windows he washed. He likely told himself, again and again like a mantra, that they were spoiled rich kids who didn’t know the real world. He didn’t have money for school maybe, but he had life experience. He knew how to pay his rent, dodge his creditors, and avoid police. He could survive life the same way a stone can survive a river, faceless and slowly wearing down to nothing.
Meanwhile, while he lived his thoughtless life the college kids learned. They read thoughtful books, had thoughtful discussions, and smiled the bright smiles of thoughtful, hopeful minds.
It probably took a very long time for the non-thinker to see how hollow his life was without something to focus his thoughts on. He may even have drudged his way through seven years, four cities, four colleges, and discovered the truth of Aristotle’s words. He might have stumbled across history and philosophy and thought to himself, “Wouldn’t writing about the world around me be a far more uplifting job than bussing tables?”
There are plenty of people who don’t need college to fill their intellectual quota. Tradesmen, artists, entrepreneurs of all kinds find ways to put their mind into their work.
For those of us stuck elsewhere, starving to slow death of the mind, the university is where we can look at everything the world of thought has to offer. It’s where we get to sample every morsel till we find something that sparks our mind. You can’t learn everything, but that’s beside the point; you’ll find that one golden field of study. The word “academic” is only the derivation of Academy, the first school for those ancient Greeks. Even they didn’t want to be stuck washing dishes and coming home to a hollow place where their mind should be.
