The dizziness of self-direction
This summer—the summer before my first year of university, the summer before the unknown and unfamiliar, the summer of advice and assurance and dos and don’ts—has brought about unease of unexpected proportions. It has also given me plenty of time to ruminate on new beginnings.
I have never been good at beginnings. Any excitement that has snuck up on me has inevitably been eclipsed by an uneasy restlessness. I have learned that beginnings are seldom the steady, unhurried debuts they ought and are made out to be—they are, instead, sudden and alarming, and demand that I adjust accordingly and play by their rules.
My unease has revealed itself in a way that I can only describe as dizzying. I seem to be spinning and spinning and all the while I am desperately trying to find my footing. I am seeing blurred faces and places bleeding into each other like some kind of abstract watercolour painting, and yet I am never able to make out whom or what I am looking at.
And now this summer—this feverish, unquiet summer, the summer of dos and don’ts and dizzy, endless spinning—has finally met its end. This new beginning has charged towards me and I now find myself face to face with all things new and unfamiliar.
While there is much to say about the outset of my university experience, I have concluded that orientation is, ironically, rather disorienting. This apparent paradox has given rise to a very curious transitional crisis—a crisis which has led me to undertake a strange, frenzied exploration of what it means to “orient” oneself.
“Orientation” is derived from the Latin word “oriens”, meaning “rising” or “eastern”. Just as the sun rises in the east, orientation marks an illuminated beginning—the first glimpse of the sun at daybreak, the first step upon a university campus. To orient oneself is to see the dawn of a new day in all of its hopeful, unclouded splendor. Orientation is the first light—promising and piercing.
By definition, to orient oneself is to determine one’s relativity to the things around them. An animal scans their surroundings to prepare for a migration, a child familiarizes themselves with a foreign setting. We look for some suggestion on how to behave based on where we are and whom we find ourselves with, and we imitate and impersonate and become. We try to blend in. We search, often desperately, for some point of reference upon which to ground ourselves. To orient oneself is a primal act of adaptation. It is, above all, both a technique of survival and success.
In embarking on this investigation of what it means to become truly oriented, I have realized, somewhere along the way, that I have never been able to recognize my own metamorphoses from disorientation to orientation. It seems that while I can remember and relive the stage of pre-transitional daze, I am unable to access memories of trial and error.
I have forgotten that dizzying in-between, the stage of uncertainty that I now find myself writing of. Again, it seems as if I am looking at a painting, only this time, the greys fade away and all that is left are the blacks and whites—the knowing and the unknowing.
In realizing that no grand, revelatory “a-ha” moment exists, how does one know if they are oriented? When does one find their feet and become aware of this fact? I have no answers to either of these questions. What I do know is that you are never aware of whether you are treading on the right path, but one somehow knows, deep inside of themselves, that they are lost.
In Walden, a work on self-discovery and exploration, Henry David Thoreau writes, “Every man has to learn the points of the compass again as often as he awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction.” I have yet to venture out with only a compass in hand. I have never trekked through nature and been left to my own devices. I have never willingly gotten lost and interpreted it as some kind of daring expedition. I have never truly known what it means to orient oneself.
How do I navigate my way through this passage of time? How do I navigate myself through this new, unfamiliar place? I wander. I look for direction. I embark on some endless, dizzying journeys. I hope that I can come to that revelatory, “a-ha” moment, where all stands still, and all makes sense. I hope that amidst all the chaos and confusion, I can stand, finally, at some idyllic clearing in the woods. Another part of me hopes that I cannot. I hope that all people and things blend together to create some kind of beautiful and weathered landscape. But yet, I know that I will never be able to make out the bleary strokes of this painting without squinting my eyes, and I know now that the needle of a compass may never point any one way.
This journey—the journey before my first year of university, the journey of discovering what it means to orient oneself, the journey of questions and answers and landscapes and bearings—has taken me through the etymological, the personal, the ironic. Whatever it is that orientation means, whether it is a time in which one finds themselves familiarized, conformed, resigned, reconciled—I hope that when we look upon the path ahead, we see, clear as day, the ceaseless, glistening, great unknown.
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