Final year

Last semester, I occasionally thought about the students smoking in a huddle outside the library in mid October, puffing away late into the night, griping about a dissertation suffocating them into a state of self-pity. In that moment I felt detached, swept briefly away into a world I didn't understand yet seemingly expected myself to empathise with. The truth is that I did empathise, but only in the ludicrous, vague feeling of emptiness that accompanies anyone leaving the library late at night - the feeling that you have morphed into barely a husk of limp muscle, stretched excessively over a brain drained by the lateness of the hour. This is a final year.

A final year is when the bedroom, once full of old family photos in a desperate attempt to project personality and emotion onto the walls, now exists barely for sleeping. Now campus is life’s centre, superseding all else. Writing this, I am once again ensconced within the horrendous grey of the main library before term has even begun. Though productivity is currently ebbing away, the motivation to write remains lucid enough for now. So on I shall write, even if the precise purpose of this piece presently eludes me beyond the massaging of ego that comes with even maintaining a blog. It is a diary with the nerve to presume its inner thoughts are of remote interest to others. 

Without study, I feel directionless in Edinburgh - swept up in the 'happening' of other people's lives. Like any city, it has become a place to do things rather than somewhere to simply be - at least as a now somewhat weary resident and not as an excitable fresh-faced tourist sort of creature. 

In lieu of doing, I have been in retreat, wasting away hours with the mundanities of technology in between daring thoughts of life beyond this present, undergraduate existence. Accompanying me on these ponderings have been my dusty laptop screen - lazily eyeing Master's programmes here and there - newly reinvigorated mould and a residual indoor chill that demands jumpers by day and pyjama-covered goosebumps by night. Emptiness is not only confined to the library late at night.

How indicting it surely feels to only define one’s wellbeing by the schedule each day could possibly carry, to not extract joy from simply being. Instead, one relies on the ‘doings’ within their own life far more so than any possible altruistic joy extracted from other people's.

On these days, technology is the crutch that deprives myself the task of having to maintain any resonating thoughts, it is the emptiness of social media and games that produce the same effects as being made to sit through The One Show on repeat, only with far more addictive qualities that can subdue the urge to scream in despair at what life has momentarily come to. 

Hence, after a day that begun with productive intentions, a failure to achieve meaningful study coupled with failures of addiction has led me here. Attempting to synergise my mind and fingers into something vaguely coherent, I’m left acknowledging all the pretensions that come with thrashing out the above paragraphs to do so. Yet still, you are reading, so we continue.

Before Christmas, I attended a Swedish Lucia church service in Edinburgh that, I am told, fell short in certain aspects of authenticity. Aimed at maintaining the family-shaped audience's focus over an hour and a half, tradition surrendered to the introductions of a Father Christmas character, instrumentation and gospel-like swaying and finger clicking among the choir. The revolution will be glacial. 

Regardless, it was only during the Swedish rendition of Silent Night that I bowed my head and felt intimidated by the looming finality of everything. Things will happen for the last time, knowingly or not. In the uncertainty of the future comes the knowledge that all may not be bright, that the scope for misfortune is broad. For the sake of future days it is necessary to retain a cautious optimism, a reason to justify putting up with the mundane banalities that persist in each small day in the present. Clothes are washed, faces sporadically shaven clean, meals eaten with a vague regularity to give the body the slightest chance of chronological control before all hell breaks loose. All is done in the knowledge that the future is due, and could deliver an upturn in fortunes worth pursuing. 

Not that happiness is itself something to be pursued as much as something to observe, something to be. More cynically, it cropped up on my social media that the art critic John Berger described it as an encounter without sequels. 'Happiness is what pierces grief'. I am not unhappy, nor am I far more dispiritingly apathetic. Instead, I am here in the intermission between the two acts of my final year at university, bemoaning the unproductive status quo I have temporarily established that leaves me empty and frustrated. And the only consequential thoughts that abound my head are that of the future - ominous and uncertain for a somewhat unknowable period. 

Soon, I will be busy. Public writing will revert to less selfish, coherent pieces on matters likely related to people riding bicycles or the student newspaper from which I am now liberated of formal responsibility as of last week. Private writings will twist themselves agonisingly towards academic deadlines, negotiating every researchable minutiae en route to critical analysis and engagement of academia's hottest available topics for a Scandinavian Studies and Politics student. I will be busy, I will be doing, and I will savour the city that thrives on the occupied minds of its residents. In those moments, maybe, all will be bright.