The anticipation is killing me. It wasn't so bad when I was occupying my time with things like schoolwork or hanging out with friends, but stuck between a frozen cornfield and an empty social calendar, I have too much time to myself to swim around in this equilibrium between major stages of my life. Packing, helping around the house, and tying up ends of my responsibilities in the states only takes so long, so, I find myself sleeping twice as long as normal, and allowing my mind to wander more than it should. On my way home from saying 'goodbye' to everyone at school this past weekend, I started formulating an idea as to why this process is such a grueling one. I wasn't going to share, but I figured why not? Why would anyone take time to elaborate on an idea and not share it? I realize I'm not an evolutionary biologist, or a sociologist, or anything related really, but here is a very raw (and probably horrifically incorrect) hypothesis of an ordinary student in an extraordinary time in his life as to why the action of leaving is so difficult:
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Hypothesis: It should be against every instinct in my protective fiber to leave a colony, a group of surviving, prospering, satisfied, and comfortable fellow humans. It is an action that, in earlier years of survival, most likely led to death in one way or another, and therefore, thanks to evolutionary development, accompanies great mental strain. Our primitive lifestyle, the era of true survival-of-the-fittest, is the phenomenon responsible for shaping human emotion. It is with no doubt that in the civilized, cultivated, structured, mapped, complex world today, a world concerned less and less with physical survival and more and more on personal and/or material development, that rollover instincts from a simpler lifestyle do not mesh with the age of air travel, television, internet, religion, science, procedures, culture, knowledge.
The chemical reactions in my noggin are not always going to be the ones I would prefer, but I cannot control or overcome millions of years of design by trial and error. Therefore, as a rat in modern society, scrambling and hurried in the contemporary mazes and webs of civilization, human emotions are just another obstacle one has to overcome. Because I know that leaving my home and cutting off priming relationships with friends, (seniors specifically) whom I may or may not see again, leads to greater personal, intellectual and occupational development I can justify the act of leaving, and consequently dismiss this emotional stress as an instinct of primitive protection - an emotion designed to progress organisms toward a safer future, but ironically in the present day, a deterrent restraining my leap forward.
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5 more days...
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