I was sitting in my Jewish American Literature class last week when my professor said something that stopped me cold. In the early 20th century, many Yiddish writers immigrated to the United States and shifted from publishing in Yiddish to doing so in English. In just fifty years, Jews went from writing Yiddish in ghettos and shtetls to running the biggest publishing houses in the world: Simon and Schuster, Random House, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. My professor said that this “development happened at such a rapid speed that it could not even write its own history.”
I thought that idea was so beautifully put. And terrifying. Because I think that may be what’s happening to me at Yale.
On the phone today, my mom asked me how my day was. I could not recall where I had been or what I had done. I feel like I am standing in the river and the water, my life, is just merely washing over me. It is just happening to me. It is an overwhelmingly passive exercise—the transformation imperceptible, the drift total.
Our lives are a river and we are all kayaks. Our boats are on the water, but we still have to row and steer. We still have to put energy toward creating the life we want and stoking forward momentum. But the river here moves really damn fast.
I am hit with a constant barrage of information, conversations, opportunities, obligation, and ideas, that I can’t take it all in. I want to marinate in it all, but I don’t; there’s no time. I don’t give myself space to let what I’m learning change me.
My boat often feels janky and duct-taped together. Sometimes water leaks through and I rush to patch it up. Don’t let the ship sink. Don’t let the water get in.
It makes me scared that my college experience, and maybe my life at large, will just occur to me, as if I am putting no energy into the system myself. Like I’ll look back and realize I moved so fast that I couldn’t even write my own history.
So the logical thing to do is to eddy out.
I’m from Idaho. We have both calm rivers and rowdy, ripping whitewaters. I’ve spent a good amount of time in a whitewater kayak, learning to read water and observe rivers closely and navigate them in my boat.
When you’re kayaking, you eddy out to slow down, to give yourself time to wait for your friends, to take a breath, to stop so you can look at the obstacles and water ahead of you. You dig your right paddle under the water, methodically, to create friction. Then you shift your core and hips to the right. You trust that placing pressure into your side is the correct thing to do.
More often than not, you’re riding a pretty fine line, because if you put too much pressure on your hip, you’ll flip your boat. Skilled boaters can roll back up, but sometimes, even if you’re experienced enough, you’ll flip, pull your skirt, and watch your boat float down the river without you. You’ll be up shit’s creek. It’s a bad spot to be.
Eddying out is a skill as difficult as it is necessary, and it’s vital to being a good boater.
Here’s the thing: I haven’t eddied out at Yale yet. I’m realizing that if I don’t soon, I’ll get caught in the hydraullic: the circular, churning whitewash that keeps folding you back under, over and over, until you can’t tell the surface from the riverbed, just the same water, never flushing you out the other side.
There’s always the scary possibility you might flip your own boat. You might see your friends, or people you thought were your friends, float right by you.. You might miss the internship or recruiting for banking or your paper deadline. The river here is a raging one, and everyone else is still in the wash, paddling fast, playing in their boats, learning and growing so much. It happens so quickly that you cannot even recognize that it’s occurring.
So why would you stop? Why would you risk falling behind?
But here’s what’s scarier: never stopping at all.
Never taking the time to look at where you’re actually going. Never checking if the obstacles ahead are ones you even want to navigate. Never asking if the river you’re on is the river you chose, or if you just got swept into it because everyone else was there too.
What’s scarier than missing one internship? Graduating and realizing you rowed hard for four years but have no idea where you were trying to go.
What’s scarier than your friends floating past? Becoming a stranger to yourself.
What’s scarier than slowing down? Moving so fast you can’t even tell your mom what you did today.
When you successfully eddy out, you’re sitting beside the rapids, but still in the river. You’re watching the place exist and watching the system function without your impact on it. You’re observing it as a whole, at a bird’s eye view. You’re thinking about how you should navigate it.
It’s unfamiliar. It’s serene. It gives you something essential: the ability to turn around and see how far you’ve come, the water you’ve already navigated. You can clean your lens and get the water out of your ears and dry off and eat a snack and take a deep breath. You can see what lies ahead, the shape of the river, where it’s taking you, what it’s all for. You can re-prioritize.
And then, when you’re ready, you take your left paddle and make the same sweeping motion to get back into the river. It will be scary, once you’ve slowed down, to propel yourself back in the cold water.
I guess this is all to say that I’m going to try to eddy out soon. It’s not me quitting. It’s not me capitulating and crumbling under the power of the water and the pressure of school. Rather, it’s my deliberate choice to think about my journey here. It’s my attempt to observe the history I’ve already made, to actually write my own story instead of letting it happen to me.
Maybe you need to eddy out too.
Not forever. Not as an escape. But as an act of authorship.
The river will still be there when you’re ready to get back in. And you’ll know, finally, where you’re trying to go.
In his 1984 Baccalaureate Address, “Give Time to Time,” Yale President A. Bartlett Giamatti spoke about a village that had fallen into darkness. The villagers didn’t wait for the dark to lift. They didn’t follow their councillors out into the night looking for answers. Instead, they returned back to their houses and lit their lights.“The villagers knew that it always gets late, and that when it does, the truly wise will make light and use the time.”
The villagers knew something that I’m still learning: that writing your own history requires you to stop long enough to hold the pen. Eddying out is how you make light. It’s how you refuse to let the water just wash over you.
