We have made it to the second week of the spring semester. For many of us, the feeling is bittersweet. The second week is the time when college habits reassert themselves fully: We've gotten our schedules and our books, and winter break at home with family seems only a distant memory. This college life is a strange thing. We have two homes: one with family and one here in Gainesville. We have two places to call our own, yet paradoxically, we truly have no place. It is enough to make one utter the maligned phrase, "I am homesick."
Many experienced this emotion as they pulled out of their family's driveways in cars laden with luggage for the trip home. Few admit it; however, who among us does not feel it when we drive through the storied landmarks of adolescence? There is a distinguishable pull — a voice in one's head that asks, "What are you doing? Your place is with your family, not some school a world apart." We think these things, but we do not vocalize them to our peers. To do so would be to admit immaturity and weakness, or so we think.
We live in the most mobile society ever experienced by mankind. We have cars that can take us hundreds of miles in a day and planes that can fly us around the globe. When we graduate, we expect to take jobs around the country to promote our careers. We have learned that the path to success is one of constant motion. We live in a world where sentimentality is nothing but an accursed weakness.
We find ourselves scorning our backwards ancestors — those medieval paupers who never traveled more than 30 miles from their homes because they lived in poverty, never dreaming of what we have accomplished.
We have skyscrapers that would make the Tower of Babel look like a crude shanty. We have machines that allow us to craft technologies unthinkable 100 years ago. We have amassed great wealth because we are not afraid to move, not afraid to sunder our roots in search of richer pastures.
And yet, as we leave our family driveways to pursue our education, that voice persists, "This is your place." "Place" — it's a quaint word, isn't it? It is a word forgotten in our constant struggle for achievement. Our place, we think, is irrelevant, a means to an end. Place is for the weak and the complacent. Those who cry "Homesick!" are surely just those who were not mature or strong enough, the pitiful souls who could not embrace what mankind is capable of accomplishing if only we could forget such existential limits. Or so we think.
However, the voice persists. No matter how excited one is to return to college, there is always a feeling that what he or she is doing is unnatural. As the modern age crept upon us, did we sell our souls for greater wealth and opportunity? I would not assert that leaving home for college is immoral. However, that feeling of homesickness is not a sign of weakness either.
Rather, it is a sign of our strength and of our innate love for the family and landmarks we have come to know over time. Even as modern students, we still hold in our hearts the flickering light shared by those who came before us, who knew that place and limits were important features of any life.
Do not hasten to leave behind these roots, for they will prove more permanent than any college transcript or future career. Most important of all, do not be ashamed of homesickness, but embrace it. It is proof of your humanity in an age of mechanization and transience.
Luke Bailey is a history junior at UF. His column appears on Wednesdays.
