What Williams gave me — The Williams Record

What Williams gave me — The Williams Record: 1. Loss and waste are not permanently crippling. When people ask me what my biggest fear is, I say loss, or waste, because I believe that loss and waste underscore most fears. And I know that in my own life, my most fearful, panicked moments have stemmed from loss and waste – death, loss of love, waste of potential, the notion of how we as a society, a country and a world misappropriate resources that could otherwise benefit humanity. This semester I read Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, and I started to reconceptualize how I understood loss. I started to recover from my own losses; I started to rethink my own decisions, seeing them not as finite, actualized choices through which I have spent – and therefore decreased – my potentiality in life, but rather as potentialities in themselves, as stepping stones on the greater path of my life’s trajectory. If Stoppard’s Thomasina Coverly can discover the second law of thermodynamics before dying in a fire, if I can accidentally delete 12 pages on Ulysses and then recover my ideas, if I can be held back in pre-school and graduate from Williams, if I can love again, if I can panic and then sit up and go to class, then I can also work with like-minded others to salvage loss and waste elsewhere.