New never gets old: Even a tiny insect can be a thrill if you’re away on an adventure
My older son has been dedicating a lot of this summer to making sure he’s ready to take advantage of all the learning opportunities that will be unlocked for him when he heads to college in a few weeks.
It’s a great approach that’s bringing plenty of important benefits.
I have an easier time not panicking about all the huge new expenses when I can see him making a good plan, for one thing. The whole family’s been enjoying the charge of second-hand excitement, too.
And, sure, he’ll also benefit from all the orientations and summer webinars and advisor meetings.
But it’s been reminding me that some of the most important lessons I learned during my own college years had nothing to do with lectures or labs.
There was the hard-won knowledge about exactly where the line is between a helpful caffeine boost and debilitating jitters when you’re pulling an all-nighter. Also, how a good backup strategy — say, knowing how late the library stays open and where they shelve the modern translations — saves you from crashing and burning after you do something dumb like adding an unneeded class on Middle English literature to an already heavy schedule.
Until I can make myself useful in some sort of kind of Canterbury Tales-related emergency, I’ll keep applying those other lessons.
They came in handy just last night.
It was almost midnight, and I was starting a long drive home from visitors day at my younger son’s summer camp when I realized it takes more caffeine for me to pull an all-nighter now than it did in my college days. I hadn’t guzzled nearly enough.
Fortunately, I had a backup plan that saved me from crashing and burning: conversation with an interesting passenger to keep me awake.
I was giving another dad a lift home from that scout camp, and we got to talking about the things our kids have gotten out of scouting that aren’t listed in requirements for the merit badges they’ve earned.
I said the best thing I’ve seen my kids get was probably a taste for outdoor thrills. Not just adrenaline-pumping thrills like the summiting of a 14,000-foot mountain my older son is planning just before he starts college, but also the quieter thrill of watching a sunset from a high bluff that his little brother had described over lunch on visitors day.
As we shifted to talking about our own outdoor adventures and then others that we’d heard about, the conversation did a fine job of keeping me awake and alert. It hadn’t quite landed on what was best about our kids’ experiences, though.
Noticing how beautiful the Kansas sky out the window was when I woke up this morning, full of the sort of colossal bright white clouds I don’t remember ever seeing on the coast where I grew up, I realized that the best thing my boys have gotten from scouting was the simple chance to regularly go someplace new.
It’s actually never mattered where.
That’s something a different college-bound kid, my niece, taught me two months ago. Or something she would have taught me two months ago if it hadn’t taken me until this morning to get my head around her revelation.
See, things like the majestic Midwestern sky have been grabbing my attention more powerfully ever since my niece flew here from California for her cousin’s graduation party.
Once the party was over, I had no idea how to make things fun for a 17-year-old girl stuck far from her friends for two days until she could fly back home. So I gave up and just took her along on what passes for fun for a middle-age guy.
We went to an off-leash park and watched dogs swim in a lake while kayakers paddled nearby. We wandered through the woods and took a half-dozen close-ups of a tiny black bug with a big orange abdomen to ID later, and then stopped so she could call a friend and tell him all about it.
Later, when she mentioned how amazing the outdoors are here, all I could do was laugh. This is a kid whose backyard swimming pool looks out on a panoramic view of rolling foothills spread out under snow-capped mountains, framed by fragrant lime trees and some kind of big-crowned pine.
Here in flatland Kansas, though, she got to go someplace new a couple times. And she taught me that to eyes jaded by a grand mountain range, a new, tiny bug can be thrilling.
It’s been fun to look around at the everyday sights here with that new perspective since my niece left. But it’s going to be a lot more fun to talk to her, and to my son, about the things they see and do on their college adventures.
There’s so much of the world they haven’t experienced, and every bit of it is thrilling when you step into it as someplace new.
Richard Espinoza is a former editor of the Johnson County Neighborhood News. You can reach him at respinozakc@yahoo.com.
