cqchen life

This is quite an apt title given by WordPress for this inaugural post of this website. Very soon, I’m leaving what I know in search of what I don’t, both practical questions of science and policy but also philosophical ones of family and place. Also just some fun and adventure, I hope. But before I embark on any step of that quest on here, I’m starting from what I just left behind.

It’s 2 a.m. the morning of Stanford graduation, and I stood on the lawn at Mars. I probably should have been packing or better, sleeping, but much like the college experience it represented I had opted to ignore the shoulds and spend the night outside with the people I grew to love.

But this night, fortunately unlike most other nights, I was crying uncontrollably. First of all, what my friends and I have been calling “nostalgia farming” music was playing on the speakers, the night rounding off with Night Changes. A lot of songs are applicable to graduations, I realized (e.g., Rivers and Roads, Slipping Through My Fingers…). Second of all, it was really starting to hit what was about to change, after that night.

I was in a debilitated state.

It was my last night at Stanford with these people (kind of, most will stay), my last time on wandering the Row as an undergrad, my last day for three months I’d be in the US and seeing anyone I know other than family.

I was crying for these lasts — the gravity of the past but also the tremendous pressure of the present, trying to cling onto memories by clinging tighter to each other.

I’d realized pretty early on that what a Stanford education truly brought was not the textbook education I might’ve understandably once imagined college to mean. But over the years I had pinpointed exactly what I was most grateful to Stanford for:

1. The people — the wonderful, real, deeply quirky people
2. The exhilarating freedom to explore the world, in every metaphysical sense
3. The gift of risk

I’ll give credit to Stanford for indeed attracting quirkiness, and for fostering it within the essentially coded traditions (many of which the new admin seems to want to destroy… but that’s a different essay). But it is truly remarkable the extent to which the pot filled with ambition, raw talent, a deep value for creating community, etc etc brewed together into the spirit of Stanford I came to know. People who care deeply for each other and the world, and ultimately willing to devote themselves and their time to those causes.

Certainly, my view is very much mine, skewed by the fact that I spent the bulk of my time in communities where the work was hard, hours long, pay low — The Daily and Hamm — but regardless, I saw the best of our generation in these spaces. I saw how quickly a commnity can emerge from a group of just-strangers and how strong those ties could become to spark action. It’s honestly not a far stretch from planning trips with newly-bonded friends to thinking of ideas for companies and projects.

This is all to say, I met the best friends of my life at Stanford. Some who hold the same values as me, others who’d sut plan the same kind of itinerary when traveling, others who care deeply about the same social issues as me, and many indeed who share all of these characteristics and more. These are people who care about the coolest niche fields in the world, have the most incredible range of talents (everyone who is in a band, wow), and still manage to commit so much time to the others immediately around them.

And further to say, I was terribly distraught at the thought of missing some of these people in the fall, and missing all of them in the summer. This is a fact that was a primary motivation in the creation of this website (WordPress being a comfort blanket of a host on the Internet since my ECHO days). I think that it is still a true sentiment, nearly a week later give or take with time zone differences, and I can pretty surely hypothesize it will remain true through the summer and fall too. I am really frankly quite sad.

But, I’m also not writing fairytales here, and I don’t owe myself a happy ending right here. I’ll leave this one as a ~ to be continued ~ more apt anyway for te seminal nature of this post.

Am I nostalgia farming? Perhaps. As easy as it is to reminisce in a melancholy wistful mood it is pretty easy to just not think about endings and just of new beginnings, live in the present, carpe diem, all that. But it is kind of nice to be a little emo right now, and it’s probably good for coming to closureI.

I’ll let myself keep farming at least a little bit.