I'm not done yet

Life at Princeton sometimes resembles that mentality a little too much. Two years ago, I wrote about how we should choose to enjoy our hectic and busy lives — if that is what they are — as we are the ones who chose to pursue the challenging paths that we walk here. However, I did this without the understanding that the structure of Princeton leadership often encourages us to reach this point of exhaustion and surrender. With elected or appointed positions in student groups primarily holding term for a single year, we easily get used to quick rewards, short-lived commitment and a mental preparation to leave our commitments not so long after we have begun.

In my time here, I’ve seen many opportunities for leadership or general extracurricular involvement come and go. And some of these I’ve squandered, speaking of how I couldn’t wait for each of them to end after a few months on the job. Whether performance groups or campus publications, I have been guilty of counting down the days to when I could begin to say “not my problem.” That is, until this month.

Just over a week ago, I said goodbye to my role within my eating club. Although the position has been difficult at times, it has also been the single most rewarding experience of my Princeton career. I worked with amazing people who helped me grow up, got to have a job that peripherally included maintaining relationships through the chugging of beast and (hopefully) helped set a foundation for future leaders within the club to develop. And at the end of it all, I repeated to myself the cliche I had already been saying to interviewers all fall in my attempt to pull on their heartstrings: “I’m not done yet.”

Knowing what it’s like to end something with so much more still to give forced me to think how out-of-place that seems in our campus culture. Everyone’s asked me how excited I am to have many privileges as an emeritus without any responsibilities, but at the end of the day, it’s not so exciting. A year is not enough to experience everything, to appreciate everything and to accomplish everything I wanted to, and the structure of Princeton leadership is the number-one preventative factor. Granted, four years at a university necessitates short terms in leadership, but I sincerely believe that it comes at the cost of our ability to internalize long-term commitments.

Next year, the Class of 2012 will enter a world in which one’s first career isn’t their only one. Mentors have told me that members of our generation will have several careers before we finally retire — something which is not horrible in and of itself, but something that is indicative of an inability to find true and lasting passions. And this, I would argue, stems from the habits we learn in college. In the same years that we learned the infectious (but honestly, annoying) lyrics to Katy Perry’s “Firework,” we also become “fireworks” — shining bright for a few moments before we exit the sky in search of new meaning and existence.

There is little reason to embattle the extremely limited terms we occupy in college organizations. Still, I challenge all Princeton students, whether in your first or final months on this campus, to take on an awareness of these limitations — an awareness that equips us to fight the urge to quit when we have only just begun. In those high school races, my team and I may have laid everything out on the course, but within a week, we were back and ready for more. Here, we may have those moments of pushing through and engaging with frustrating moments of pain and weakness, but taking the time to breathe for one minute, and then ending it all with the willingness and desire to do it all again, will give us the endurance and stamina we need to pursue those things we truly love for more than a stint. And then, at the end of the day, we will hopefully all have the bittersweet opportunity to say with satisfaction and deep-founded joy those four simple words: I’m not done yet.

Joey Barnett is an anthropology major from Tulare, Calif. He can be reached at jbarnett@princeton.edu.