Stages of an Academic Life

(1) The Beginning

You look out over a landscape of books and PDFs of journal articles and papers and everything looks desolate and chaotic and you're sure that if you take even one step down into that maze of tiny pathways between the stacks, the walls of this world will collapse upon you, leaving you buried forever in other people's words and complicated ideas. And you go in anyway.

(2) The Panic

You walk up to an article, pick it up, and realize how woefully unprepared you were. You spend more time looking up the terms used in the paragraph-long sentences than you do actually reading the words on the page. You dig at the ground underneath it only to find a connecting series of tunnels papered with concepts that you may have heard of but certainly don't understand. The sky above you has yet to change from the stormy gray it was when you walked into the maze and so you choose the tunnels. At least it'll stay dry down there.

(3) The Shaky Confidence

The weather seems a little better as you climb out of the tunnels, a storm breaking up rather than waiting to break. You understand the groundwork here, how easy it is to get sucked into old thought patterns and old ideas, but also how so many of these stacks are connected, are built upon each other. You've emerged back into the book-scape in a completely different place than you were before, but that's fine. You've got a compass now, the vaguest ideas of a mental map beginning to form.

(4) The Exploration

It's actually exhilarating, being around this many ideas, this many thoughts, now that you feel like you've found your footing. So you read and you read and you read and then, for a change, you read. You read. There are some suggestions for other things you can read. You start to recognize names and concepts, to know where the tunnels are going to lead you if you take them again, and to see that some tunnels are regular thoroughfares and some are collapsed and some have fallen into disrepair but still have their merits. It was the easiest thing to be lost among all these words, and sometimes you still do, but you know the major streets. You've figured out how to get home and that's a comfort to balance the excitement of leaving in the first place. There's actually some sunshine in this place after all.

(5) The Building

You've noticed some gaps in the walls as you've walked, some question mark-shaped holes in the stacks. Before, you'd thought that surely someone would have considered this possibility or made that connection or clarified this point, but it seems like that's not the case. You settle in, leaving only to pull other words toward you, to help lay the foundation upon which your own thoughts are going to stack. Sometimes what you build tips sideways and sometimes it tumbles completely, but each time you have to correct, you find a better way to build, some way of shoring up the walls or strengthening the joints. You've seen this done before. It just takes time.

Or at least, I assume it does. But what do I know? This is my first time here too.