The Sun’s Brighter Than I Remember - Opinion

Katie Ioffe | kioffe22@dtechs.org

Nicolas Gibson | ngibson22@dtechhs.org

It’s a warm, spring day as I watch the marsh flow calmly past. The sun’s bright today, brighter than I remember it being. Perhaps I shouldn’t be staring at the sun. Nearby, a crow caws atop the unmistakable reflective glass of Design Tech’s pristine campus. It’s quiet, pensive. What a strange time it’s been. Sometimes good, bad, or wonderful.

What’s wrong with strange, anyway?

I remember how I was four years ago. Enthusiastic, yet timid. A true believer in the that childish notion that deferring happiness now creates increased results in time. I was young, so I can be forgiven for thinking that that, along with the Star Wars reboots, were a good idea. Still, through it all, I’m immensely grateful for the challenges and experiences I’ve gone through during my adolescence. These years have changed me. They have made me.

Here, I shall reveal to you those past four years, painting my highest highs and my lowest lows. You shall be privy to details both irrelevant and inane, such as the fact that I presided over a Doctor Who fan club when I was fifteen. In return, I ask only one favor of you: have hope.

My first year, by all accounts, was like one of those modern rockets. What goes up, must come down in a fiery explosion of magnificent proportions. I interned at Stanford, and spent the summer working with white haired professors and graduate students in a basement laboratory. I excelled in my classes, which I balanced with fencing and homework and studying for the SAT. I was, I hope, a model student. But I suppose I must have been a very sad human being, because, as the old saying goes, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. The price I payed for this focus was a simple lack of enjoyment of my youth. I didn’t really stop to try to connect with people, or to enjoy the moment.

Enter Covid.

As you all know, the world as we know it ended two years ago. It was a bad thing, of course. Only a monster would say that Covid, the cause of countless deaths and a sort of collective societal madness, might actually be a good thing. 

Still, it was a good thing, wasn’t it?

That’s not to say that lockdown and the subsequent isolation was entirely pleasant, nor the resulting chaos of a global pandemic a preferable outcome. Still, I take comfort in the notion that things can always be worse. A perverse sort of optimism, I suppose. Lockdown was a strangely enlightening period. I went from a socially inexperienced introvert, lost in the confusion of the rush of modern society, to an introvert who at least interacted on a semi-weekly basis with other introverts. The mechanism for this was a science fiction club which became oddly popular during the pandemic. Students from different high schools, and later, colleges, would all meet on our Friday video calls to discuss everything science fiction. It was a blast. We regularly stayed up into the wee hours of the morning debating the physics of space stations. Eventually, I had to say goodbye to these people who had become my friends in a time of meandering crisis, as they went off to college campuses and into the world. I still miss them, sometimes.

There is a modern hysteria surrounding social media, a sort of moral panic not seen since the salem witch trials. But I developed a rather more literal wariness of technology, something which I might only call a sort of “techno-phobia”. If I even touched a device so much, I felt the need to run to the bathroom and wash my hands. It was as though all technology had become abhorrent to me. I eventually came to an epiphany. The reason I felt this way was not because of the technology itself, but what it represented. Isolation and cold inhumanity. A calculating mechanicalness that exacerbates the image of isolation. And through this realization, I over came that fear. And do you know what I realized?

I need you.

Yes, you. All of you. And we all need each other. We all need a hand to hold, someone to talk to, to laugh with.

Forget everything. Just for a second, forget it all. Maybe it matters, maybe it doesn’t, but do you know what really, truly matters? 

You. 

All of us, we matter. And if we matter to each other, then that’s human connection. That’s compassion, and friendship.

It’s easy to forget that we need something so simple. But when you’re deprived of water for two years, all the world’s an ocean.

So please. Smile. Laugh. Give someone a hug, tell your loved ones that you love them. Because you know what?

Bad things can happen. Good things can happen. You can be afraid, or sad, or angry, sometimes. We’re only human. But that sure as heck doesn’t mean that you have to stop being happy. “Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we might die,” as the old saying goes.

The sun keeps on shining, and it’s probably brighter than we remember. Just don’t star directly at it.