Branching Out: Caroline Slama

I recently felt this rush to write down all my thoughts, feelings, and ideas for this world before my passage into scholarship at Bryn Mawr College would alter them. But minutes into taking inventory of my mind, the realization came that my thoughts were not the unadulterated “me” I had assumed they were. Finding the origin of even one thought I have would be comparable to tracing the lineage of topics in one of those late night conversations you have with a friend you haven’t seen for months. It’s impossible, as connections are made— between you and that old friend, or you and your mind—that you are not aware of, and that just slip by your consciousness. In sophomore year of high school, my English teacher dropped a faded pearl of wisdom on my class: he told us there were no connections. Without knowing exactly why, I found his words strangely empowering.

“But it’s so true,” I would later explain to doubting friends, “Nothing is connected outside the human mind. Everything we perceive, we perceive as ourselves, and each of us is an individual. So we can’t be sure that things that one person sees as connected are connected in every other individual mind.” Connections truly are gossamer-thin, wending their way through our minds, taking as peculiar a route as we wish them to take. It is a tribute to the power of our minds that we can forge bonds between so many discrete topics and objects, and that we sense these bonds as being so real. And if things are not inherently connected to each other, that means only thatwe have no time to waste in creating new ties and strengthening old ones, anchoring experiences in some sort of knit reality. Such connections give my life meaning. So, for my own sake, and for yours, I want to make bonds, connections, links, ties, anything that will harness everything we can lose and love into a network of humanity. This might sound like an enormous dream, but don’t be daunted. In reality, it’s just many little, connected ideas in the mind of a new freshwoman.