With what post-secondary education means evolving by the week, summer at Camosun could mean more now than it ever has. I once wrote an editor’s letter sitting under an oak in Beacon Hill Park looking at the ducks and hoping to see a peacock. Alas, one didn’t spread its wings, but I couldn’t help but think that it was still a really neat way to be a part of the college community. After all, throughout history, the act of communities spreading out is a vital step to prosperity.
Those nice ideas juxtapose the realities facing Camosun staff, faculty, and students. None of us have a crystal ball. At the end of every day, I can’t help but think that I might be—both as a student and your veteran student editor—one day closer to the end of it all. Now, if you wanted to be philosophical, that’s true for all of us. It’s not a stretch to say, then, that that same carpe diem ideology—for we don’t know how many days are left, in any sense of the humbling idea—is front and centre for me right now. The layoffs are starting to roll in; I imagine there’s a portion of the student population who would like to matriculate but can’t. The reasons—be they financial or ripple effects of national or international sovereignty—aren’t important here. The point is that each of us can slow down, rethink what it means to work productively, and live the cliches (don’t forget to breathe; experience oneness; feel the ground under our feet), but also experience any well-justified sense of doom or malaise that might be hovering over us like a boomerang ready to drop.
The good news is that each of us can choose what to pay attention to. I can hear you Philosophy majors whispering about free will, but choosing not to choose—rather, to be okay with whatever happens by recognizing the fact that just because, technically speaking, each one of us is insignificant in a global crisis, doesn’t mean we’re any less valuable—is a choice, too.
Regardless of if you’re gainfully enrolled and employed or painfully rationing dinner until the next CERB cheque, take a breath and sit under a tree in Beacon Hill Park. We’ve all got each other. Watch the ducks and the flowers, and the sun and the malaise. Just watch it and remember: spreading out is prosperous.