Bonding
Humans are a social species. We form and break bonds all the time, and though it may be tiring, being surrounded by people is such a blessing. Having people around you that all have different personas and different lives, but most importantly having people that care. I want to be someone who cares, but as a senior in high school, it's not always easy.
Starting a new school year, I’ve already had the opportunity to have so many new experiences in making new interactions. Starting with a completely new set of classes and classmates helped me reunite with old friends from middle school and friends that I used to share extracurriculars with, especially during the trip to the Telunas we went on for my English class. We attended writing workshops together to create academic relationships, but we also spent a lot of our free time together on the beach talking to people we usually wouldn’t strike up a conversation with back at school.
I’ve talked to almost all 308 seniors at least once, creating shallow bonds, but do I still make an effort to check on how they are doing? Do I wave to them in the halls? Do I actively invite them to hang out? Not really. Not for majority of the people out of 308. Us being seniors, we are constantly worried about college applications, stressing about school work, and pressurized by clubs. I believe this is one of the biggest contributors to my broken bonds with my old middle school friends. We used to text each other every day, eat lunch together, hang out beyond the borders of SAS. As we got older, however, we had just about a hundred other things to focus our undivided attention on.
It’s not a secret that human nature isn’t the priority at school. In the competitive and fast-paced nature of SAS, I always have deadlines to meet. Everything is more important than forming bonds with people. Why? Because it feels like my life is being timed with a stopwatch at all times. If I wasn’t spending my time doing something quantifiably productive, I wasn’t spending it right.
Maybe it was the sound of the waves that calmed down the stress or maybe it was the isolation from school work that separated my mind from everything, but at Telunas, the stopwatch wasn’t there. Here, on this random island off the coast of Indonesia, I found myself prioritizing unquantifiable tasks over quantifiable ones. Coming back from the trip back to school, I found myself waving to the people I interacted with at Telunas. I would intentionally approach them with a conversation, ask them about how they were doing, and everytime I did that, I felt a little ball of warmth throughout my body. These used to be just the people I went to school with every day. The people that I would cross paths with but walk past without acknowledging, and suddenly, now they’ve become my friends and that to me is the most delightful feeling.