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Sunrays danced off the multicolored leaves reflecting sporadic light onto the damp ground of the Arb as I walked in solitude. My footsteps came alive by the crunching of dead leaves that fell in regular intervals from dying trees, bending over in response to time, which flows incessantly forward, perpetuating all things into chaos. Here at Carleton, there are several ways for people to isolate themselves, from walking in the Arb to living in Goodhue. No matter how antisocial these options sound, it is always important for people to go back to themselves and leave time to enjoy every moment, as those moments dissolve in every instant, joining the past. The most beautiful thing about each and every moment is how temporary they are; as soon as they come, they go and never return again in the same form. Motion is the fundamental state of all things. Reality moves pushing our lives along with it.
Exploring the Arb is one of my favorite things to do, not because I have the set goal in mind to actually find something, but merely because nature has a sort of charm to it that resonates with me no matter what I am doing. It is similar to loving someone, where the two of you need not to be doing anything at all, and just being there fully aware in the present moment is all that matters. In these moments time decides to speed up and run ahead of you right when you needed it most. But such is the nature of all beautiful things, as soon as they are experienced, they reveal how fleeting they are or at least how fleeting your perceptions are of them. Nothing is permanent. All things ebb and flow by the dictations of destiny, wrestling control from your gripping hands.
Stepping onto the Carleton campus for the first time forced my mind back four years into the past to confront a very opposite experience I had with arriving at high school for the first time. Despite my high school being virtually the same size as Carleton, there were major differences in aspects much less conspicuous. The academically rigorous atmospheres were both fairly similar, but have some major differences. Here at Carleton there is much less, if any, pretentiousness compared to my high school. People behaved as if they needed to show how intelligent they were through each and every action they did. At Carleton, that atmosphere is much different. Here there is much academic rigor, but it is combined with a non-judgmental attitude that pervades the campus. It is really a respect for the vast intelligence many of us have in some area of knowledge, but there is no expectation for someone to know everything about everything. That expectation is unrealistic, and such a breadth of knowledge would only serve to spread one so thin that they forget what they really do enjoy, rather than what they ought to enjoy. Here at Carleton, I have already had many beautiful moments and I hope everyone else is also enjoying every beautiful moment as they flicker into existence and decay into the past.