Loveliness

For many students of the liberal arts elite, undergraduate existence is an era of unchecked decadence. You can eat a packet of peanut M&M’s and a cigarette for lunch and get nothing worse than a few judge-y looks from the girl headed towards the gym in Lululemon. You can saturate your bloodstream with controlled substances, sleep until 2 p.m., not shower for three days, bury your bed in dirty clothes. Most of us don’t have a kid or a dog or even a houseplant. The only responsibility you have for four years is you, and yet, if you’re anything like me, you can’t even be trusted with that. Let’s assume that we already attend to our chronic self-absorption and readily engage in the daily battle against solipsism, and consider the state of our internal worlds for one indulgent moment more.

Why are we so self-destructive during our years of prime vitality? It’s beyond “College, no parents, no bedtimes!” We aren’t even very good at hedonism at Middlebury, a little too lazy to really get wild. We seem to halfheartedly zombie through our days, become the worst versions of ourselves and fall into truly ugly cycles. After a night and half a morning of unwashed, nicotine and caffeine-fueled library blitzing, we crawl into bed for a four-hour nap while a beautiful day blazes outside. We live in strange extremes, like Siddhartha pre-Middle Path or St. Augustine pre-middle age. I’m not saying we’re living in sin — I don’t think I can make any kind of judgment call when I refuse to stop drinking straight from a bottle of Charles Shaw on a Tuesday night or to stop taking heroically long naps. But I do think that our default is pretty obnoxious and doesn’t make us happy. We are fast, young things in the lap of luxury and opportunity, and we are not living very well. That’s not a Middlebury problem. That’s a me/you/us problem.

Making space for happiness is a process of getting clean, in whatever small or large gesture that requires. I think we could start with intentional loveliness. “Intentional loveliness” is something I just made up because I like the word “lovely,” so much so that several different people have recently informed me that I overuse the adjective. Reworking some little part in your life to make it “lovely” isn’t necessarily an aesthetic change, but it can be as simple as that. I’d like to argue that letting a friend pull your tangle-y hair off your sticky-with-stress-tears face, brushing and braiding it and changing out of your sweatpants into your prettiest crushed velvet dress simply for a trip to Proctor dinner is almost better than an hour of therapy. Pulling ourselves together doesn’t mean that we need to start training for a marathon, eating quinoa and setting 9 p.m. bedtimes, though if you can successfully overhaul your life like that, holler at me, you role model human beings.

Luckily for this columnist, this week coincides with a religious festival that complements this idea of getting clean in order to make room for good things. According to the Hindu Student Association (HSA) and Wikipedia, Diwali, also called Deepavali, is the festival of lights for Hindus and Sikhs and began last Sunday and ends Thursday. It is a time of fresh starts and involves cleaning your living space, sharing good food with friends and lighting candles and lamps to celebrate the good that overcomes the dark. The spiritual aims of the festival remind me somewhat of the Christian Lenten season, though it boasts a more lighthearted atmosphere that I think is more appealing than the abstinence of its Western parallel. I think this wish or greeting to be shared during the festival of lights, again provided by the HSA, better articulates this idea of finding loveliness within us: “The sun does not shine there, nor do the moon and the stars, nor do lightning shine? All the lights of the world cannot be compared even to a ray of the inner light of the Self. Merge yourself in this light of lights and enjoy the supreme Deepavali.”

Be kind to yourselves this week by scrubbing some part of your grimy existence. Wake up early and wash your face. Put on your power outfit. Do your laundry. Be lovely and light.