Belonging to the Sea

Finding community, even if with your own self

Yve Spengler

My friends from my small hometown warned me that a sense of loneliness would wash over me if I attended a school with a big college campus, like the University of Minnesota. They told me I’d drown in the sea of faces I’d encounter in lecture, lose sight of the professor in the front of the room, and slip away from an education anchored in connections. They said all this without ever having tried to swim in a large body of water, not realizing that underneath the surface is a unique ecosystem of beauty in which your voice can find harmony in the ensemble. I can’t blame them, because aren’t we always trying to find reasons to avoid the feared unknown?

Although daunting, the fact that the University has such a large community can make it easier to find a place in which you truly belong. When you start to swim a little deeper, you may form an unexpected friendship with someone you never thought you’d click with—initially surprised by the contrast they provide to the limited archetypes of friends you knew from your small midwest highschool. It may turn out this person—despite her blunt nature clashing with your more subtle one—becomes your very best friend after you get to know one another on a more profound level, because of the way you balance each other’s lives out. You may realize they were the person in your life you never knew you were missing before. 

This newfound balance may give you the ability to be a little more experimentative and dive a little deeper. And it might feel like each incoming wave of student groups at the University threatens to topple you under its crushing peaks. How will you know which student group to join when faced with so many options? There are options for anything and everything you might choose to do. The University is made up of various clubs from Anthropology Club to the lettuce-eating club, where once a year, students eat a whole head of lettuce as fast as they can in competition with other students. So many options gives anyone, even the indecisive folk, the ability to try to figure out what might or might not work for them. Who knows, you could be a lettuce folk and not even know it! Either way, you are allowed to investigate in a way you simply cannot when there is less of the world around you. 

Not finding a group that feels like home is perhaps what deters so many from large college campuses. But it is normal to go through a lull as you try and catch the wave you belong in, however fleeting belonging can sometimes be. This lonely feeling can wash over you even if you attend a smaller university, but the beauty of a larger campus is that you may also catch others drifting by themselves. Being alone holds less weight when you can see those around you also floating by, unaccompanied. Perhaps, you’ll start to find yourself warmed by your singular presence, beginning to prefer the solitude spilling out of your soul to being around others who can drain you.

As I walk down the Washington Avenue bridge by myself, I understand why my friends might consider me a part of the lonely big school. I walk in solitude, a rarity in my small hometown where you can’t leave the house without running into someone you know. Just as there is an intimacy in the assurance of finding someone you know when traversing down familiar streets, there is an intimacy of carrying yourself without the need for companionship. My outward appearance of being companionless contrasts to the deeper inner feeling I have of contentment with myself, the one these friends can not see. They can’t observe how I feel myself filling on the inside, knowing that in my walk, I belong perfectly as a part of the chorus of the sea.