Spin that Cube

Well, we survived another Welcome Week on the Michigan campus, successfully navigating the orange cones, dodging the misguided out-of-towners, and vibing with the newly robust crowds at Bill’s Beer Garden. And just like that: Everything old (that’s me) is new again (that’s them).

The author (right) receives a visit from a beloved former student worker.

Working on a college campus for much of one’s career creates an approach to the calendar that deviates from the norm. Around here, the new year begins in August and ends in April. The months in between serve as a sort of way station — still busy, still active — but a time to reflect, regroup, and reorganize.

As August kicks in, the air crackles with an abundance of youthful and contagious vitality. Discovery, adventure, and unimaginable possibilities are there for the taking. Snatches of conversation at the $2 pizza joint reveal futures in the making: scientists, explorers, and novelists abound. At any moment, a single encounter or decision could transform history.

For an imaginative person obsessed with time travel and quantum physics, the college campus is an ideal venue to engage with ideas like string theory and alternate universes. What if I could go back in time and do it all over? Make different decisions and step through different sliding doors? Try out for marching band, pursue that master’s in creative writing, apply to study overseas? Where would I be now?

But sitting behind the Union on a beautiful August afternoon, watching the Cube spin seemingly of its own accord, I accept my temporal reality and the choices that brought me here. Perhaps I don’t need to go back in time, but can just rest in the confidence that I’m living my best lives — millions of them — across the space-time continuum. (Too bad I lacked the brain power to major in physics.)

The collective wisdom suggests that working in an environment like a college campus “keeps one young,” although the birth certificate might beg to differ. So as the whippersnappers and their maize-and-blue potential surround me in this particular life, I accept my fate, my decisions, and my ever-changing reflection to embrace that brilliant observation Matthew McConaughey’s character makes in the movie Dazed and Confused: I get older. They stay the same age.