by Olivia Barker, Arts & Leisure Editor and Staff Writer
When the red and yellow evenings of October and November corrode into December and an unforgiving chill starts to creep along the edges of morning and night, the faces of Centre students seem to turn graver. The darkness comes sooner and goes later, the last moments of academic prowess loom over a wilting campus, and the corners of each red-bricked building seem to ease helplessly into the cold, frozen reality of the winter. In this place, there is a deafening silence.
It is our habit to turn our noses up at this silence. To run from it. To fear it in such a consuming way that our entire body rejects it; fear that should it get too close – should the winter take its fullest form and the silence embody its days and weeks and months – that it will consume us altogether. Lost in the inescapable, snowy silence we will be.
But I implore you, Centre students, to recognize the beauty of such a cage. Silence feels lonely at times, but there is an admirable elegance in silence, to be observed only when we allow ourselves to slow into its clutches. There is beauty in the walk alone.
When students huddle into the warmth of their dorms and the careening paths of campus seem empty, there is a stillness – a rare, fleeting moment of stagnance in which the mind can sit in perfectly calm thought, doused in the careful delicacy of the silence. When the cold dances through the air in such a way that it blushes your cheeks and tingles your fingertips, waltz with it if only for a few brief seconds and see the smoothness of its steps and the tranquility of its twirls. And when the cruelty of the winter turns the cold inward, leaving you with an insatiable impatience that sends you cursing the every nature of the silence, close your books, put away your computers, and take a look outside. See how the world caresses the edges of fiction in its surreal calm. And here, in this quiet moment, understand that at the very core of the winter and its silence is patience.
It is patient for you. It is three short months that stretch into a spectacular plane of infinity, beckoning for you to marvel in your own introspection; providing you the time and the quiet to confront the loud echoes of your being. It hides you in the gray folds of its cold, promising you this shelter to grow and to grow alone. Promising you peace.
So before you allow yourself to be grasped by the greedy fingers of your academic agenda – rushing you along and disintegrating the gentle quiet in its urgent wake – step away for whatever seconds your day can spare. Stand in the winter air, painted carefully in a fresh coat of a thin chill, and remind yourself that these months are a quaint but invaluable gift. Don’t let them elude you.
Happy December, Centre.