For many, autumn is the season for new beginnings.
By Gary Margolis ’67
I can see the barn door, but not the pasture. This fall, I began my 37th year of counseling Middlebury students. I’m thinking of what I say when parents and alumni ask me what’s new about this class of freshmen, now called first years, and what is still old about them.
Students leave home and live with someone to whom they are assigned. They decide what to wear, how much to study (or not), how late to stay out and what to do when they do stay out. They see who they like and who likes them; who will really want to know them.
They are beginning, as students were encouraged in medieval universities, to find their place in the universe and to find wisdom. Imagine if we encouraged wisdom the first week of college in September, when they are trying to find where to buy books, where to do their laundry.
Freud (forgive me) said the goals of life were “zu lieben und zu arbeiten,” to love and to work. To that I add: to text, to Google, to Facebook. And to decide how to treat the inevitable and necessary symptoms, residues, and richness of life.
We can expect most students—during this “best four years of their lives”—will experience heart-rending loss, if they haven’t already. I’m amazed at how many students, as teenagers, have had to grieve. A break-up. An exclusion. A death. I once proposed we rename our counseling center, “The Center for Grieving and Healing.”
I’m also moved by how resilient they are—students who have endured crushing poverty, natural and man-made traumas, and other assaults to their bodies and souls. These are the students, too, who have survived and earned and found their way to Middlebury.
A student said, “How can I feel so sad at the same time I see that flowering crab apple tree outside my dorm window?” In his classes, he was reading about beauty and loss, and writing papers about what he was taught, what he was feeling and discovering on his own. In his labs, he was learning to count and observe how things change, what things remain the same. He was feeling what Walt Whitman wrote: “I am large, I contain multitudes.” He was embodying contradictions.
Middlebury students, over this career of years, have allowed me to listen to the heart of what they say; what they express in the privacy of a counselor’s office, so they can say what they need, to their roommates and sisters, mothers and fathers. So they can stand up, as here in Vermont at a town meeting, and say what they need to say. Or anywhere their true voices are needed.
There’s a barn I can almost see across the fields from my office window. These days, my colleagues ask me, “What are you going to do next?”
“This is next,” I like to say.
Gary Margolis ’67 is executive director of the Center for Counseling and Human Relations and associate professor of English and American literatures at Middlebury. His book of poems, Fire in the Orchard, was submitted for the Pulitzer Prize by Autumn House Press in 2002.