It’s move in day and you are a tiny freshman walking onto what seems like a huge campus for the first time. You don’t know anyone. Like, not even the last name of your roommate. You have already seen about fifteen strangers with boxes filling their arms as you walk up and down the stairway getting everything from your car stuffed into your tiny dorm room.
You are walking back down the dorm room hall when something happens. It’s unexpected and sudden, like it should be in a movie or something. But you hear this voice from behind you and feel someone tap your shoulder.
“Hey! My name is Kim. I think you are going to live across the hall from me this year.”
Then, that’s it. She broke the ice. She made a connection. Went out on a limb and made a friend. And that continues to happen for the whole day. You meet new people; try to remember new names and faces. You get little snippets of people: Tyler is from New York and loves the south, Lilly went to a prep school in England and you have Environmental 112 with her on Monday at 9:30, and Cam is on a baseball scholarship but really just wants to become a doctor so that he can help people.
And this sort of thing doesn’t just happen to freshmen. All you need is a group of new people, in a new place, where you don’t know anything or anyone yet and then bam. Human instinct takes over and people start making connections.
Say it’s your first day at that amazing internship you landed for the summer. You are sitting in the lobby with your name printed on your name tag just like the other twenty summer interns, all waiting to start their first day just like you. When the blonde girl sitting next to you with her face perfectly painted on says, “Hey I’m Izzy, I love your skirt.”
And then that’s it. Same as Kim, she took the jump and reached out to make a connection. For whatever reason when people are placed in a new environment with all new people who are also in the same boat, they end up feeling unified just because they’re in it together.
So then, as the weeks melt into months and months melt into a semester, everyone loses that need to connect. They settle into a core group of friends, which is great. You get to form amazingly deep relationships that way but you lose the drive to get out there and continue to make new connections.
This also happens when you travel. You think, I can take a risk here, no one knows me, the worst thing that can happen is some stranger thinks I’m weird. So people go out of their comfort zone and branch out. They do it on airplanes, they do it in hotel lobbies, even when they are out sightseeing. There’s just something about travelers that unifies them enough to take a risk and introduce themselves.
So here’s my proposition. If we all act like we did when we were freshman, we will end up making more connections and having more experiences. If we go out and try to live boldly and adventurously, we will look back and think man that was fun. That was a good life. Instead of looking back and just seeing yourself watching Netflix every free moment you had.
And I’m not alone in thinking this way. There is an app, Rendezwho, designed to inspire people to travel and make friends. The app has 10K users which means at least 10k people out there want to continue to make these kind of bold connections with people.
Take for example the sophomore slump. (Disclaimer: this is a real thing people. I didn’t believe it until it happened but it really does happen and it sucks.) You go from Freshman year where you hang out with new people every weekend, exploring the new city you are in, to Sophomore year where you occasionally have a movie night with a couple of your friends.
And there is nothing wrong with chill movie nights. I love them as much as the next guy, especially when I just had a stressful week, but to go from a year full of random adventures to movie nights all the time can lead you to think “What the fuck is going on.”
I think we should live life-like we do when we are freshmen. We should continuously search for that new connection. We should try to get out of our comfort zone every once in a while.
We should take that jump just to see what happens.
Featured image via Yomira Valdes on Pexels
