RealLife > Whitworth

I feel more balanced and more concrete when I spend time off-campus in the RealWorld. I like to sit in a church that has families of all ages, and old people with hearing aides. I like to see the mall filled with people with RealLives. I love summer when I get to be home. I spend my days working at FIRM, where I am surrounded by a full community of all-ages and we all have symbiotic roles to play. I spend evenings with friends or family. My life is full, and I have meaning.
At Whitworth, my life is full, but I drown myself in depression and cynicism. There is a magic balance where I can still get everything done well and also not have a moment to stop to think. That is the only way I have learned to do Whitworth well. When I am off balance, I have to go somewhere new. It can be a meadow by the river behind my house. It can be a museum. It can be the mall. It can be a new coffeeshop, or a conversation on the bus. When I get back in contact with RealLife, I remember how RealLife works, and my tiny but important role in it all.
. . .
I was told last night that its presumptuous to say that OutThere is RealLife, and here is only pseudo-reality. I am presupposing that the nice people swarming this campus don't have some essential quality of life. Who am I to judge?
I contend that we pay good money to be isolated from the harshness of RealLife. We are a group of 2,500 people in the prime of our lives. We rarely die. We eat 2-3 (and more) meals a day without having to think about where our food comes from. Of course there are those who choose to skip meals to lose weight or spend their time elsewhere. I've been there, too. Our main concerns (outside of social interests which transcend any monetary barrier) are homework and "earning" letter grades, or at best, learning material written and taught by our elders.
It doesn't matter to me what the inner life of my fellow students is like. It isn't necessary because they have the luxury to be able to meditate on vocation and worldview and life purposes. If they choose not to take themselves seriously, its their loss. (I do take time to have coffee and get to know people who take their position seriously. I love people like this; they just aren't my passion)
Our isolation is also our loss. We lose out on the love of older people in our community. Kids lose our continual presence in their lives. Although many Whitworth students volunteer with various organizations, its just another time-block in a busy student schedule. We lose out on grocery store conversations. We miss out on demonstrations on corners, and seeing into the eyes of our city's homeless. We don't see kids walking home from the bus stop. Our lives consist of us. and our friends. and our computers. This isn't Real to me.
. . .
Connecting theory to practice is a major tenet of service-learning. What good does our education do us, if we can't connect to a complete community (not just one made up of our like-minded peers)? Furthermore, does this separation through education make a permanent break between us and our communities?
I feel like it does for me. I feel like the more and more educated I become, the less and less I have in common with most people from my home. I have more in common with educated people. I have less to talk about with former friends. I know too much, that even our grand conversations about big dreams for Fresno are filled with my obscure(in Fresno) references to dead Europeans who have already thought about these things for many years.
What is knowledge if I can't use it in community?
Although Whitworth has a very tight community on campus, the tightness is not as easily accessed from the outside. The culture has strong expectations for behavior, morality and vocabulary (and accent and skin-tone, although religious fervor can triumph both). I don't see our connection to Spokane. I don't see my connection to this community here, and I am seeing how thinly stretched my connection to my home community has become as well.
. . .
When I leave here, I will enter the RealWorld again. I will keep figuring out how to do my finances better. I will have a job, and will relax after work doing whatever. I know that my lovely depression and trust issues will persist, but I feel so much better about them when I am in the presence of a varied society that spends its time on mundane RealLife things.
I really am idealistic after all.