Ryan

At the end of this month, I will have been in Chicago for one year.

I flew here late last summer with just two suitcases jammed with clothes, a few pairs of shoes, and a couple books. I had never been to Chicago, but had struggled all season to save up enough cash for a plane ticket and a deposit on an apartment, and as the tires touched down on O'Hare's tarmac, I tallied the trade-off. Things left behind: friends, family, the beach, a few crates of books, a dismal career as a gigging musician. Things awaiting me on the other side of a three-hour flight: a job tutoring, teaching, three years of graduate school, a manuscript.

But there was more to the trade than just things. Leaving North Carolina and moving to Chicago felt like a start and a finish, like saying goodbye and hello at the same time. But that's just the nature of moving, and the nature of school. School is strange like that: on one hand, you feel like you're putting the final touches on your education, wrapping up what began when you were only five or six, and on the other hand, you feel like you're only at the beginning of something else – a career, a journey, a life.

The college is liminal space, really – an in-between, threshold kind of place that thrives on mixing and remixing itself: a mix of that crazy thing we call “real life” and that crazier thing we call “the academy”; a mix of students and professionals and professional students; a mix of urbanite and suburbanite, rural and international; a mix of past and future.

And if any of this sounds overly romanticized: it is. There is absolutely something romantic about the idea of self-betterment and education that we associate with greatness and drive and all those other college brochure words. We should feel that way about it, shouldn't we?

The simple answer: I'd like to think so, or at least I hope so. After all, I'm here in Chicago, at Columbia (as a student and a teacher) for a similar reason to anyone else: I wasn't done learning. I like to think that's a good enough reason to jump time zones, and I'm sure I'll be wherever I am in five or ten years because, even by then, I still won't be finished, and will have swapped Chicago out for some other set of things to gain. And that's perfectly OK with me.