I’m blogging. That means I’m thinking too much. A curse I fear shall never leave me.
I was walking home after a ward FHE. It was a small group of about 20 of us. I am starting to know names but I’m still far from the familiarity that I had in my last ward. It isn’t them. It’s me. I haven’t let myself join them yet. All the shy features of the boy who hid behind a coat for years in primary have just been suppressed, not replaced.
I came to my new house. I’m still in awe every time I enter it. It’s a three-story yellow house with symmetrical gardens and a stately red door. Leather furniture graces the sitting room and light pours through abundant windows. It was quiet. No one is home. I bundled around the garage a while and fiddled with a flag pole I intend to erect soon. I walked in. Quiet, stately, adorable. I wander up the wooden staircase to my suite and check my email. A habit that is far too strong for my own good. From my window I can gaze up and down the street filled with quiet peace. I bumbled around the internet a few minutes and glance at the clock. Hours to go before I will sleep. Tomorrow? Nothing but work.
I wander down to the sitting room with its massive leather recliners and turn on my carefully wired stereo. Clutching my UVU water bottle I survey my domain. The house is clean, open, inviting, everything precisely laid out for thoughtful contemplation and pleasing conversation. But there is no noise to fill the halls. Just me. I have found my ivory tower. A place whether all the learning of the universe is at my fingertips. I have eliminated the noise in my life and discovered time and solitude to take myself apart and reconstruct whatever self I could possibly desire to be. I recline the chair, strikingly noisy in the still room.
Last week I finished the last preparations of my undergraduate degree. I fulfilled all my goals as a lowerclassman. I maintained relatively high grades. I finished my major in 4 years, ahead of the average and most of my classmen. I achieved my minor in Spanish. I worked in the greenhouse, in the testing center, in the library, in multiple labs. I became friends with many professors and even spent three terms studying away from campus on study abroad and field studies.
Last week I finished the requirements to graduate with honors, the highest distinction an undergraduate can achieve. I had to stand before three PhDs and defend my thesis, an original contribution to my field. Usually a student will find a good mentor and work in their lab and write a thesis on some aspect of the mentor’s research. I chose a topic in which no professor was doing research. It was precariously focused on law, which is outside of undergraduate curriculum. I strove to find a unique niche that not even my adviser could help me with and wrote a thesis in spite of all the help I received to the contrary. I was accepted into grad school even before finishing my honors distinctions. I had found my way into the ivory tower.
So I sit in the darkening leather room as dusk fades into night contemplating my arrival here. I am more educated than 94% of the world. I am in a graduate program on my way to a master’s degree and nothing says I have to stop there. The door is open. I can climb the steps of the tower with little hindrance. I have a place of quiet where I can focus on the intricacies of the carvings and the careful processes of gleaming stair leading to its isolated roost.
I could sit in that tower forever; watching the world, pondering the foibles of human nature and dropping the occasional letter of advice from my lofty vantage. After all, who knows better how to harvest the corn than he who can see the rows from above? Who knows better how to solve war, and hate, and hunger than he who has escaped their grasp? Who know better how to succeed in relationships than he who has read a thousand novels and visited a hundred weddings?
It’s dark now, the silence deeper without the leaves moving out the window. My adorable yellow Ivory Tower is everything I feared it would be, though it’s everything I dreamed it to be. This is success right? I am the master of my domain, it is exactly the way a domain so mastered would be expected to be.
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