Under the Raydar

For many of us graduating in May, this is a time of stress, half-hearted application-filling-out, cover letter re-writing and the concern that we might be living with our parents and continuing our high school jobs next year.

So many of our conversations have turned to the future in this period of uncertainty, and all of this has brought me to think about some of the things that have remained constant throughout my college career.

When I was a first-year, my roommate and I were walking into town, and as we were approaching the swing set near Twilight, she turned to me and said, “Wait. This might sound weird — my mom gave me this advice once. She said, ‘No matter how old you get, when you see a swing set, you have to stop and swing for a little while.’”

We didn’t have anywhere to go in particular, so we stopped and swung on the swings. We chatted for a bit and continued our walk.

A few weeks later in the semester, we were both pretty stressed — coping with new deadlines, friends and schedules. It was probably 11 p.m., and we decided to go on a nighttime walk to get away from our stacks of books and worries.

When we saw the swing set on our way into town, we stopped at it.

We ended up staying there for a while — venting, talking, really sharing for the first time. Eventually, we ran out of things to say, and in the silence, we decided that the swing set would be where we went, whenever either of us was upset, stressed or just needed to talk.

We went to the swing set when she was worried about a friend from home; when I was trying to decide if I should break up with my first long-term boyfriend; we went in the middle of the night, even when it was negative 10 degrees and the seats were coated with ice. We would bring trash bags to sit on so that we weren’t too cold.

Most often, we went to the swing set when we were worried about the future.

After two years of swing-sitting, Molly and I returned from studying abroad.

Where we would study abroad was something that we used to worry about during our swing-talks. She had wanted to go to Chile and study medical science, and I had wanted to go to Bordeaux to study French.

She ended up studying political science and Arabic in Egypt, and I ended up studying fiction writing in England.

When we were both back in Vermont, after six months apart, we walked out to the swing set. Through the end of the semester, however, we both ran different schedules, and we rarely had a chance to go. I would walk right past the swing set, preoccupied with thinking about something else. I got in the habit of not even stopping for a minute.

Sometimes I think we walk past the things we need to stop at most — especially when we are trying so hard to get somewhere certain. Maybe it’s because those things are always there, or because we are trying too hard to depend on ourselves and maybe it’s caused by something entirely different. I’m not really sure; but I do know that all the things we have worried about have become past tenses, and we’ve gotten somewhere. Wherever we’re going could change in a moment — Bordeaux became Norwich for me, and Chile became Egypt for Molly — so we might as well stop along the way to our own wherevers.

Though the final destinations, cover letters and decisions are important, so are the long drives, the dirty martinis the night you get a disappointing phone call, a swing set in the snow. Molly’s mom was right: you are never too old to stop and swing. You are never too old, too busy, too sure (or chaotically unsure) of anything to not need a sense of balance in the present, even if that balance point is somewhere in midflight.