Somewhere in the mountains of Tibet I forgot how fast life can be. It was either the macaque monkeys making valiant attempts at capturing my lunch or the ethereal mist that hung over the monasteries dotting the cliffs, but perhaps both were instrumental in helping me lose my complete sense of time. I remember thinking then that despite what appeared to be my total departure from life at home, in a few short months I would be back in Middlebury surrounded by those who also had made the seemingly impossible journey from the ends of the earth back to the figurative center of it all. I remember that while excited for whatever lay ahead I also dreaded again facing the very things that had originally driven me away to a land of monkeys and mountains. And yet it felt like merely a short breath had gone by when I found myself back at Middlebury. Having lost my sense of time long before my return, it was pretty easy to feel lost.
For one, I returned to find a Middlebury College that physically in many ways did not resemble the home I had stored in my brain as a reminder of my roots. A new building had come to life, a construction site that magically had become a center of liberal-arts life. In that building, a room where time appeared to be playing a joke on itself as first-year fiddled with their new iPods and Blackberries under the watchful eyes of Julian Abernethy (a reference I hope you alumni get).