Last weekend, I went back to Hanover for Homecoming. That is where this essay started. It started as an inkling that Hanover is a place of intense presence. Immediately upon arriving, I felt little need to check my phone. There were too many places to visit. Too many things to do. Too many feelings to feel. Too many people to talk to. My screen time was down 55% that weekend.* When I did use my phone, it wasn’t for social media, but to text, call, and coordinate.**

Part 1: How to Generate Energy Without Sleeping (disclaimer: You Should Also Sleep)

I didn’t sleep much that weekend. In fact, almost all of the “good habits” I had worked to establish upon entering the “real world” melted away with little resistance. I ate fewer vegetables and slept fewer hours per night. I was late for practically everything because walking anywhere invariably meant having a conversation with somebody. I ran a lot. More than I had been. I did more of the things that should have made me feel tired and the less of the things that should have made me feel rested and yet I was brimming with energy.

Part of that energy was excitement. Another part was stimulation: a mixture of caffeine, belly laughter, and joyous conversation. The third part was fun — fun energizes. The fourth part of that energy was choice. I wanted to be energized. The setting felt too important not to be energized. Wanting to make the most of the trip, of the time back in Hanover with people who would only be gathered for 48 hours was a supreme motivator. It’s unrealistic to think I could lead my whole life with such urgency, but since that weekend, I’ve considered the ways I can generate more energy in my everyday life. I’d hate to think that I live Monday-Friday on low power mode only to reach full charge on the weekends.

Part 2: Memory is Imperfect but Variety can Help

The fifth part of that energy was variety. I experienced a lot that weekend. The breadth and depth of my experiences were, in and of themselves, energizing. Variety, I’ve found, has the funny ability to be either utterly exhausting or totally energizing, depending on the person and circumstance. In this case, it was energizing. To give you not only an idea of the variety of experiences but also how they have stayed with me, I spent a few minutes writing down what I could remember from memory (no consulting my journal).

The results (some memories redacted for length):

The creaking of stairs in an old cold house,

A plume of embers billowing into the black sky,

The light green glow of the clock tower,

The click of the shutter,

Flash! a disposable camera,

A sea of faces I do not recognize,

An old familiar face breaking into a smile, hugging,

Sitting on the floor against the wall,

The smell of warm sweat baked into the carpet of the locker room,

Cold air rushing over my chest,

20 guys running single-file through the woods,

Cooking eggs in a cast-iron skillet without butter,

Sipping hot black coffee at Dirt Cowboy,

Leaning over a table talking,

Nothing existing outside of those words,

Hiking Gile,

Bright leaves that hurt my eyes,

Being grateful,

Somebody else with a camera, for once,

Easy laughter,

Rueful goodbyes,

Running through Pine Park in the dark,

Walking to the river as the sun set,

Standing on the bank by myself,

The cool pink sky like it had always been,

Nothing changing,

But colder now.

For comparison, I did the same exercise for a more recent, “regular” day (last Tuesday), and produced this:

Dad in town, staying at the 1950s motel nearby,

Walking to the motel in the morning,

Last photo on the disposable: Dad leaning over the second-story railing of motel terrace,

Dad driving me to work, saying goodbye,

Doing work, probably on Excel or Powerpoint, couldn’t tell you what from memory,

Bethesda bagels for lunch with Jake,

Afternoon meetings (I think),

Dusk run on Georgetown Canal Path.

One takeaway from this exercise: We remember more about the people we love and the events that surprise us than we do about almost anything else. The status quo is important for stability, but to our memory, it’s practically invisible. This, in part, is why time feels like it speeds up as we get older.*** Obviously time stays the same. But so do more and more things. And as more and more things stay the same, we remember less individual details about each day, week, month. The identifying events of our memory spread out. Put another way: The important thing that happened last year feels like it happened yesterday because nothing important happened yesterday.

So, what do?**** The easiest answer is to refer to the first sentence of the preceding paragraph: Spend more time with loved ones doing things that surprise you. But there’s more. I think focusing on little important details of otherwise mundane tasks can help. For instance, yesterday, on a regular second run through our Virginia neighborhood, my friend stopped me mid-sentence to point out a tree. This tree had orange leaves like many other trees during this time of year, except that its leaves were partially translucent. The tree he pointed out 4.4 miles into our run was ghostly and strange. I remember the run better because of it.

Not the actual tree. That tree is in Virginia. This is a representative tree (Plato’s Forms). I also didn’t take this picture. Emma Chiu ‘19 took this picture on Rip Road in Hanover, NH.

Part 3: Getting Better with Time

The strange effects of time and energy aside, there was something else significant about last weekend that I’ve carried with me: The power of returning to someone or someplace (both are powerful—I refer to them interchangeably in this essay). It was said best in a conversation I recently had over the phone (and it sounds quite simple) but there is something downright reassuring about leaving a place or a person and returning to find that you still like that place or person. Sometimes they change. Sometimes they don’t. But there’s a beautiful natural sorting tendency intrinsic to time and I’d say it’s this: Time deepens. The people and places you most value become more valuable. Everything else falls away. It’s like a river eroding along the path of least resistance, deepening the most well-used channels. And you don’t have to do much at all. If the place that was once special to you no longer is, then it served its purpose. If you still get goosebumps going back, you probably always will.

Part 4: Epilogue

Back at Dartmouth, I spent Sunday afternoon into the evening alone, and by design. I needed some time to reflect— I had seen old friends, now I wanted to visit old places. I remember walking into Boloco to pick up a quick bite to eat. The interior was different (more stainless steel), the menu had changed (frillier). They now used Saran wrap instead of lids for to-go bowls (okay). The young guy who always rang me up now had pink hair (to show that time had passed).

I ate sitting on the edge of the sidewalk in the parking lot behind Main Street, watching the sky above Mighty Yoga begin to glow gold in the October dusk. I was hungry and eating and trying to decompress and then I was not hungry without finishing my food and I was walking: down Maple Street towards the river. I passed Nathan’s Garden. The road kicked up. At the top of the hill, I slipped past the gate and picked my path carefully down the trail. It was dark already in the woods and I had to use my phone’s flashlight to see. When I reached the bottom of the hill and stepped out onto the sheltered bank of the Connecticut River, I could see again. The pink-blue sky looked the same as it always did. It looked the same as it did a year and a half before when my best friend and I had stopped here out of exhaustion. We had raced poorly in the final track race of the season at the New England championships and we were out for a cool-down jog. Normally we wouldn’t have stopped but the season was effectively over and we were spent and to my surprise we were happy. For me, that was the beginning of the healthy untethering of happiness from performance in sport, and years on I can safely say I’m better because of that.

And it began in the spot where I now stood alone. And standing there, alone, I grew wistful — missing people I didn’t need to come back, but missing them nonetheless. I knew I would see them again. Life, I had begun to realize, was longer and more filled with coincidence than I had first thought. And so I did not rue anything, which was new for me.

I wanted to capture how I felt in the moment, so I took out my phone, opened my Notes, and wrote this down:

Time has passed. We’re all a little older. But I still think you’re pretty. I see you as I saw you then. But now you have the grace of time and the blessing of experience, and you are funny and you are kind. You bring out the best in me.

I can’t decipher that much more than to say I mean it. And since then I’ve carried a certain lightheartedness into most everything I do. I feel like I had to come back to understand that nothing you love is ever gone and if anything you feel it stronger in memory. I feel like I had to come back to reconnect with a part of myself I had stifled purposefully when I graduated because I thought it was the right thing to do. I feel like I had to come back to break down the dichotomy of college versus the ‘real world’ (they are both real) and to be an earlier version of myself (if only temporarily) and recognize again the parts that I like and want to keep (in particular, a generous sense of humor). I feel like I had to come back to see old friends and feel old feelings and spend a three-day interlude outside of this chapter of my life. It wasn’t so much re-reading a previous chapter as it was picking up a new book by a favorite author.

There’s one more thing I want to add, which is for Angela Zhang, who has consistently pushed my thinking on topics like these and has contributed as much if not more to my personal growth than anybody else. Angela, you already know a lot about the power of interludes (send me a postcard from China), but I want to add something to our understanding: They make us feel young again. I think this is because — in varying degrees — they connect us with who we were, show us who we are, and tease us with who we could be. Put another way: this interlude made me feel young again because of all the different versions of myself I got to be. Conversely, I’ve come to believe that getting older is the process of letting go. Getting older is realizing how many lives you will not lead. But it isn’t linear. And it isn’t inevitable. And it isn’t even an effect of time, not entirely anyway. It’s how you choose to live. So love more. Think more. Try to be surprised. Embrace interludes. Be nostalgic. Laugh often. Go for walks. Appreciate beauty. Cry everyday. Write things down.

Footnotes:

*If I had to pick a single metric to serve as a proxy for human satisfaction, it would be the percentage decrease in iPhone screen time.

**and to stream the tail-end of Eliud Kipchoge’s historic sub-2 hour marathon.

***The other reason time seems to speed up is that every additional year you live comprises less of your total lived experience. When you turn 1, your first year of life (Y1) comprises 100% of your lived experience (Y 1= life). When you turn 2, your second year of life (Y2) comprises 50% of your lived experience (Y1 + Y2 = life). By 3 it is 33% (Y1 + Y2 + Y3 = life) and so on so that each year feels shorter than the first relative to your entire experience of time.

****Not a typo. For readers unfamiliar with the ever-ongoing efficient compression of language, “what do” means “what do we do” but with fewer steps.