Quad Contemplations
I was enjoying a nice fall afternoon, which felt slightly cool and breezy, in that nirvana of climates that comes around every spring and fall or as those in Southern California call it: everyday.
While the park benches and duck pond of Boston Common were calling me, I couldn’t bare to trek on two T-lines to get there. Instead, I decided to explore a bit more of Cambridge. While I love the manicured simplicity and quaintness of Radcliffe Yard at Harvard, I wanted to venture in the opposite direction. So I found the Quad, a little slice of the Utopian balance at a university reminiscent of Dead Poets Society, just a stone’s throw from my apartment, down Shepard St, between Massachusetts Ave and Garden St (can you tell I’ve been to New York?). The Quad, which is home to Cabot House, is a small park, framed by four red brick buildings, dormitories and a cafeteria, complete with a tower clock, a roster-adorned wind vane, and all the New England charm you would expect. On one end of the lawn, students re were tossing a football, while others were scattered, lounging in chairs and listening to music or working away on laptops.
I took a seat and for the next hour, contemplated what being here means to me and what I want to achieve. I realized that this was indeed the balance of social and academic life that was beyond a foreign concept to me. It was more like Indiana’s discovery in the Close Encounters of the Third Kind sort of foreign.
Like many, I have brought my own baggage with me to Harvard, but my hope is to unburden myself of these lingering matters and replace them with new praxes.
It was a great hour of reflection–a word that was somewhat cringe-worthy for me–but it was the equivalent of some serious “couch time.”
I came a long way to find better meaning in education and its reform, from Houston to Cambridge, but sometimes, some of the best lessons can come from your own back yard.
