Why is a change as good as a rest?

Whenever I have had to leave Davidson for some trip or break, I have noticed that even when the time away is busy, stressful, or for some reason sleepless, I come back to campus refreshed.

Let’s say I go south a few exits for food. I enter a small breakfast diner and slide into a sticky booth covered with a film of grease and poor cleaning fluid. A waitress comes to my table, pulls out a pen and paper, smiles and says, “What can I get for ya, sweetie?”

She is genial and sincerely kind in a way that is not overdone or feigned. She knows I’ve come for good food, not to be bowed to or verbally caressed in the manner of a white table cloth garcon. I will tell her my order, she will confirm it, and any other communication will be a handful of thank-yous and the final, “Take it easy.”

Most importantly, she neither knows nor cares that I go to Davidson College. She might know Greek or Latin, and she might have an interest in particle physics, but no matter how learned this diner waitress is, she will hardly bawl over my personal tale of woe: how worried I am about my Biochemistry test next week, how difficult it is to translate the Greek syntax into English sentence structure, how stupid I feel compared to classmates who spit out answers before my sluggish mindfully processes the questions. She might smile sympathetically, her eyebrows coming to a crest in the middle of her forehead and her mouth contorted—amused that I am sharing so much with her yet genuinely wanting to help. But as she glides away to give the cook my order and attend to another booth of expectant customers, my story will vaporize from her mind. She goes back to her world—one not of supplementary participles and ablative absolutes, but of coffee, sausage, and eggs over easy.

I watch her scurry from the grill to her tables, wiping the surfaces with a barely damp rag. I look over to a huddle of denim jacket-clad truck drivers, chuckling over four cups of steaming coffee like witches cackling over a poisonous brew. I see an exhausted mother trying to cajole a 4-year-old to stop standing in the booth while also trying to bottle-feed a four-month-old.

I am struck dumb by the sheer variety of lives contained within the small diner, only a microcosmic sample of the greater variety outside the poorly washed windows. I am smacked with the realization that the world was not made for me alone, nor for the recitation of Cicero or the reading of Tolstoy. It was not even made for the obtainment of an education. I have experienced a recalibration of orientation and scope: where before the world had, as its epicenter of gravity and importance, Davidson College, it has how expanded exponentially. The college campus is a fleck on the face of the earth, like the dust speck on the clover in Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who!

My world is not the world. This was always the case, of course, and will continue to be. But somehow I'd forgotten it. The momentary terror of this realization is quickly followed by a sense of shame for having believed such a silly thing, even if only subconsciously. I squirm in the narcissism brought to light, but then, instantly, I am relieved. Without having closed my eyes or gone very far from my college campus, I find myself somehow rejuvenated.

It is the same with a trip to the woods, even the woods that Davidson owns, not half a mile from the bustle of campus. Go to the cross-country trails and walk a ways off the gravel trail. Go to King’s Mountain or some other state park, and walk for twenty minutes or camp with some friends. Trees wave lazily in the breeze. Bugs fly across the trail. Birds trill as they erupt from hidden perches to seek a new vantage point. The birds seem to laugh at each other over my physical vulnerability that requires all kinds of polyester, cotton, plastic, metal, and wood just to stay alive for a couple of days in their domain. But they aren’t making fun: any kind of self-aware contemplation of life’s ephemerality or of humankind’s intense dependence upon material goods represents a sentient analysis exclusive to the human brain. If I feel judged or made fun of by the birds, the magistrate sits in my temporal lobe, not in the branches that cover my head. My fat, feathered friends care little for the bipedal creature walking past, disturbing the quiet with the clanking of his steel pots and water bottles.

The trees watch me pass in even greater aloofness. Many of them will persist on the earth far longer than me, and they will see generations of hikers pass by. The tree will hear the gradual shift of slang and diction through the ages, he will notice the changes of humor—what things people find funny only for a while and what things seem eternally humorous—as thousands of hikers share jokes around campfires for years and years. Only, the tree is it, not he; the tree is not conscious and cannot care for the chortles and dialogue of passing Homo sapiens. Like the waitress and the truck drivers, these residents of the wild remind me of how small my world is, how little Davidson and academia figure in the composition of all that exists. Even more so than the diner occupants, Nature convinces me of my tininess by a kind of haughty disregard.

When quiz grades and meetings and leadership positions fill the universe, failure or even mediocrity in those areas feels like failure or mediocrity as a human being. If every waking moment (or what feels like it) is spent on essays and tests and sports practices, then one’s GPA or batting average indeed begins to feel like a justification of one’s very existence. But when the environment expands to include spaces that are quite indifferent to those concerns of the college student’s day-to-day—a wilderness, or even a restaurant of regular people with full, important lives—then all of the sudden the tests and the championships lose their potency. Their power to elevate or demoralize (depending on one’s success at them) is siphoned away, and, for at least one blessed moment, there is clarity and peace—a feeling often dubbed, “Perspective.”

So as I walk through the woods for an hour or take a drive down the road from campus, I am forced to ask myself, “How could I have cultivated such a soul-crushing anxiety over my lab report’s wording, my translation’s eloquence, or my essay’s wit?” I eat my breakfast or take my hike, and I return to Davidson fresh. Something has been peeled away, like the scales that fell out of Saul’s eyes as he became a new man with a new name. I return to my books ready (and more able) to complete the tasks at hand.

Of course, it will not take long for me to fall into the old habits, the old mindset. I’ll hear people bemoaning their workload or asking, as surreptitiously as possible, what their fellows’ grades were on that last test. And the familiar fear of failure will ferociously surge again, like a subdermal electric charge, constantly buzzing and building to a dangerous pitch that makes it impossible to think. C’s on tests will become a loss of limbs, and critical cursive comments on my essays will feel like fatal blows to a beloved friend.

Then, I think, it will be time to return to the woods or to Waffle House and be reminded that there is life outside each one of our personal bubbles. I will again need reminding that life can and should mean more than good performance.