The freedom to shoot the breeze

Student 1: (speaking with great enthusiasm) Hey! How was your summer?

Student 2: (with equal exuberance) Great! I (Here, Student 2 launches into an oft-repeated one-or-two-sentence summary of his impressive activities. Let’s have fun and say that he...) worked for a gecko rescue association in Timbuktu. It really opened my eyes to the plight of lizards in West Africa. How was your summer?

Student 1: (emphatically) Fantastic! I (Now, unless Student 1 stayed at home or on campus — in which case he will make a crack about how lame he is — he must parry Student 2’s gambit with an equally extraordinary precis. We will imagine that he...) worked on cancer research with some scientists in Hong Kong. I think that they’re on the verge of finding a cure.

At this point, the students exchange generic pleasantries for a few more minutes — for what do hurried students really ask each other about gecko rescuing or cancer? — until one hears his Blackberry ring or the other realizes that he is late for a cappella practice. Then, they part ways.

Since I had to come back early for Community Action, this conversation has been popping up in my path around campus for a good three weeks. Together with the regular Tiger tizzy, it has overwhelmed me. I guess that I should bite the bullet and share my own summer summary with you so that you will understand why: I backpacked around subsistence farms in Central America and hung out with revolutionaries.

I wound up going on this Latin adventure because I won funding through a Martin A. Dale ’53 Sophomore Summer Award to work on a travel writing project about life in rural Central America. One of the many things I want to be when I grow up is the spunky female equivalent to Bill Bryson and J. Maarten Troost (what can I say — a girl can dream). When I realized that I could get funding at this school for just about anything (I’d be lying if I told you that I’d never considered writing a proposal for a thesis about surfing culture), I decided that it wouldn’t hurt to give travel writing a shot this summer, on Old Nassau’s dime.

My life in Central America was the antithesis of my life at Princeton. For starters, I didn’t have much access to telecommunications. I had a few opportunities to check my e-mail during my luckier weeks. However, on the farm where I stayed in Honduras, there were not even telephones or electricity. I don’t know how my hosts would have reacted if I had mentioned that 1,900 miles away, men in boat shoes abounded with their noses buried in pocket-sized devices that could send and receive text messages, e-mails and phone calls.

In the absence of technology and pressure to prove myself in classes and clubs, I found that I had time to actually talk to other people. Hardly a day passed when I did not stop to trade stories with someone else for an hour or five. There was the guerrilla who injured his foot fighting in El Salvador’s civil war and was flown to Germany for surgery after the peace accords were signed, a mother in a Guatemalan village who had to grind enough corn for more than 200 tortillas every morning for her in-laws as part of a local labor dowry system, an Argentine artist who had traveled for five years straight by making and selling jewelry on the road. Sometimes, when the people sharing their lives with me were particularly handsome and charismatic, I fell in love with them, to quote Art Garfunkel, for “a perfect moment in time.” More than anything, I appreciated that none of the people I met ever paused to look at a screen to see if they had a message from an invisible, interrupting third party while I was speaking.

Now that I’m back in Princeton, land of rapid-fire e-mails and quick, shouted Hi’s, I have realized that I’m a much happier person when I have the freedom to stop and shoot the breeze. As a result, I have made a couple of lifestyle changes with the hope that I will become less frenetic and have more opportunities to engage meaningfully with others. I took down all my Facebook albums so that anyone who wants to know how I am doing will have to talk to me instead of Facebook stalk me, and I have committed to doing fewer activities so that I will have the time to fall into random, wonderful conversations.

At this point you may be expecting an exhortation for the reader to change too, to hug more people, to eat dinner with someone new, to maybe even run around in a field with a puppy. I am not going to do that. I am not convinced that everyone wants change, and I doubt that such small tokens of friendliness, while wonderful, are enough. Instead, I offer myself up as a reformed Tiger who decided that she wanted to build deeper relationships instead of network with all of the future Orange and Black leaders of the world. I ask that everyone else take time for similar reflection. Maybe if we all were to carefully consider how we believe we should live and change our lifestyles to reflect those beliefs, Princeton would be a better place.

Haley White is a Wilson School major from Chatham, N.J. She can be reached at hewhite@princeton.edu.

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