“Know Thyself” - Greek Axiom
In my estimation, I made the roundtrip journey to and from college 52 total times. My most common companion during these 234 hours were the cattle grazing wheat on a vast expanse of agricultural landscape. To drown out the deafening silence, I would often listen to podcasts or music. But when the internet connection finally gave out during that two hour stretch on Highway 26, I would spend my time in contemplative stillness. The gentle steady hum of the car in cruise control gave way to total immersion in a stream of rhythmic reverie.
During these drives, I felt as if everything that made me who I was - my identity, my insecurities, my past, my talents - was a manifestation of a large canyon; wide, deep and stretched as far as the eye can see. In the daily bustle of college life, deadlines and stress made it difficult to remove myself from my role as lost traveler within the canyon and see how it all had been changing. But it was during my drives to school where I was able to escape my role as traveler and ascend to a vantage point. Looking over the canyon gave rise to an understanding of the minor intricacies, grooves and nuances that had been forming over time. It was only in stillness that I was able to appreciate what was occurring in front and inside me during my college years.
As I reflect on being out of college for the past 9 months, I think a lot about what my education has done for me. Yes, there was utility in learning how to execute computer code and understand the financial and legal structure of a corporation. Sure, I would be naive to deny the advantages of constantly adapting to changing social environments. But those answers leave me feeling a hollow dissatisfaction. When I think of the financial investment and years that I dedicated to my education, it feels like I gave so much. In the ultimate analysis, long after the value of my education has satisfied the societally imposed metric of “utility”, I must ask myself how my education transformed the ever-changing, ever-searching, ever-becoming entity that is me.
This distance of time between my graduation and now is still infinitesimally small; I still see the waving hands at the port diminish in size as my ship sails valiantly and unknowingly forward. Yet, I would like to put forward my hypothesis as to what the value of my bachelor’s degree was. My degree was not earned during the late nights spent in the library or traversing the steeply inclined snow covered hills to take my finals. No, my bachelor's degree was earned in the hours of solitary, quiet reflection during my cross-state road trip. It was during these moments where I saw the places in which I was weak and broken. I found those deeply held insecurities that wanted desperately to never be addressed. They were more comfortable festering and rotting in the attic of my being. While the self-analysis performed during the silence could be deeply uncomfortable and physically unsettling at times, it was the only type of education that endured. It was only in my moments of silence where I gave myself the self-understanding, self-love and self-reflection that I needed in order to become the person I am today. I very intimately understand what psychologist Carl Rogers meant when he said, “When I accept myself just as I am, then I can change”.
One need not read scores of books or obtain advanced degrees to become educated. That implies that being educated is a permanent state, wherein you obtain a certain percentage of knowledge and no longer have to keep learning. The most valuable lesson I learned in college is that my education will never be over. Education is the ongoing internal process of obtaining knowledge, interpreting experience, and changing your perspective so that the experience of your inner world can be richer; but not in the material sense. Richer in that every moment of life becomes an opportunity for acquiring knowledge and forging meaning. Life and it’s ever changing nature will bring about more hardship and suffering than any of us would like to endure. To be educated means to acknowledge that only our presence of mind can transform pain into meaning. Our perspective is the fertile soil that makes the rose grow from concrete.
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