Opinion

Be inspired by improving your life

By Jonathan Bruder
The Daily Cougar

Good morning and good semester. I imagine you, the invisible reader, preparing for the long commute home from the university, trying to grab a bite to eat or waiting for a professor to arrive. 

In this fantasy, many of you are strengthening yourselves for the challenges of the semester, excited about your nascent status as the world's educated elite. Learning, after all, is hard work.

Some of you are anxious about the difficulties another round of courses will bring. Your nerves are shot. You don't know how you'll pay for books.

You know how important the opportunity of education is, and for that reason your joy or concern are magnified.

I see you in five years, when most of you will have graduated. Some of you will have dropped out. A handful of those will be better off for it. 

I see you in 60 years, pulling into your garages for the last time. I fear many of you will feel you haven't done enough. What will your children say when they look through your belongings?

It's tempting to boil the dreams and hopes of a lifetime into the belongings found in one room. To do so is the worst kind failure of the human imagination.

Sometimes, people seem to do this to themselves. They are transfixed by the laundry they have to do or the bills they have to pay, but still yearn for something more. 

What they desire is colocation; community. They want a shared space in the collective history of mankind. They'd like their ideas and dreams to be found in other garages. Not knowing how to achieve this, they buy larger garages and pay more bills to distract them from the ache.

Having lots of material things does not mean you have lost touch with the larger dreams, the dreams that we share as members of a one made of many. If it did, capitalism would be a lost cause. But it is easy to be distracted in the trappings of the short term.

The edges of our vast minds are full of those shared spaces where ideas and hopes transcend the individual and belong instead to the community. Bring some of those spaces into your daily thoughts.

I encourage you to find some important part of the vast human potential and work every day in its defense. It is an easy way to stay inspired without being naively idealistic.

Start with yourself. If the last semester was a poor one, you have a fresh opportunity to improve yourself. If you did well last semester, try to do a little better. Make yourself a more informed, collaborative part of the whole, and you will be pulled toward your own dreams.

Bruder, a junior graphic communication and physics major, can be reached at respond@guerrillakitchen.com.

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