The old stone walls are imprinted of historical literary figures, and every morning I acknowledge Shakespeare's remarkable heritage as I ascend the large stairway. Around me, quiet students are reading, writing or carrying their books and pencils from one room to the next. The writer within me is taken by a feverish desire to create, to relentlessly improve and expand an ever growing work of literature and to leave behind me the most intangible of material legacies, yet decidedly one of the most subtly reminiscent of my own existence. Sadly, I have to leave the English building; my Mathematics class will begin soon.
The Physics, Astronomy and Mathematics building is home to a peculiar atmosphere, a lovely blend of intellectual finesse and social inappropriateness that builds up to a distinguishable ambient magnetic field of cerebral activity. Students and professors come and go along the corridors, their bodies crossing mine while their minds, distant and sometimes incredibly elaborate, are far too preoccupied with a given fragment of the intricate harmony of Nature's Mathematical symphony. There is no nobler pursuit, nor a more challenging one, than that of unraveling yet another truth about the everlasting and unalterable world. No other career that allows one to periodically get in touch with the axiomatic universe that exists independently of the perceivable reality. As the budding Mathematician within me pursues the writing of his manifesto, I head out to the engineering quad for my Computer Science class.
As I move further from the realm of artists, conversations increase in volume and number. People all around me are walking energetically, exchanging verbal jousts of technical jargon, seldom detaching their gaze from that curiously recurring point, 10 inches away from their own feet. Computer labs and robotics workshops appear to me as utopian warzones, where men of all origins work together toward the accomplishment of what was once an irrealizable pursuit. One technological breakthrough at a time, they are writing the future, taking science-fiction into the field of non-fiction. I can sense a feeling of pride as I imagine myself working among their ranks, developing yet a more realistic artificial intelligence, elaborating yet another software for space exploration.
Young adults have the most flexible of minds. We can shift our opinions from one side to the other with minimal cognitive dissonance, never quite belonging to specific niche of the population yet well acquainted with multiple such groups. And so we migrate from a mental state to another, perhaps reinforcing our liking of a peculiar one, yet never quite losing the ability to take a step back and recognize the futility of stability. However, as we go further down the age line, the opinionated mind seems to prevail. The older the person, the more narrow and rooted will his or her set of values be, a set that is finite by necessity and thus infinitely limiting in terms of mental expeditions.
We tend to think that having a "hold over one's life" is necessary in order to be a healthy and contributing actor of the ever changing world. Yet is one more immutable opinion in the room that plays on repeat to anyone willing to lend an ear truly more valuable than a free thinker willing to transcend the political frame and enter the ethical frame before making a jump into the purely logical frame in order to phrase a much richer understanding of the necessarily manifold nature of any given issue? As we grow and evolve into adults and hopefully old, wrinkled people, let us not allow our mind to shrink into an opinionated ball; rather, let us continuously enrich our mental schema, so that our experiences might grow ever richer and our aspirations ever wilder.
