In biology, a key method for determining the function of an element in a complex biological system is, perhaps counterintuitively, to inhibit it. See, when an element is working as normal, it is near impossible to separate it out amidst the jumbled and interconnected cocktail of life. Yet when once inhibited, its absence is unmistakable and only then does its longtime role clearly emerge.
Five weeks ago, I arrived in Baltimore — my first time living anywhere outside of my home state of Minnesota. If I am honest, I did not expect the transition to be significant. I had been living on my own in an apartment in Minneapolis for the past three years and I expected my time here in graduate school to be more of the same. After all, it was still a college, it was still an American city and I was still going to be in an apartment, cooking and cleaning on my own like I had done for the recallable past. But I never realized how much I relied on those invisible, everyday details — of how many aspects of life I had taken as constants.
The first glimpses of this emerged when I was sitting in the living room with my new roommates. Amidst a discussion of what our home states looked like, one of them offhandedly mentioned that some years, Baltimore doesn’t even see snow at all. I had to resist the urge to laugh out loud. How could that be true? I had simply never considered such a possibility. For me, the first snow of the year was a question of when, not if. My mental calendar is annually calibrated by the onset of delicate snowfall and the smell of melting snow in the spring. Yet a quick Google search revealed such an absurdity to be true: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data stated that last year, no monthly average temperature even dipped below 37 degrees, a fact my Minnesotan brain struggled to wrap itself around. The idea of winter without snow felt like not just a change in climate, but rather a disruption to the natural flow of time itself.
As the weeks progressed, more began to unravel. All of the little details, the in-between moments of life that I had maneuvered on autopilot for years now required adaptation. In Minnesota, I navigated campus shortcuts by heart, even in the biggest whiteout blizzards. In Baltimore, each trek towards class finds my head bent down, buried in Apple Maps. At home, I knew exactly which classroom in the basement of Moos Tower sat empty at night, the one the janitors never checked and the one whose doors locked from the outside at 10PM: the perfect place for a desperate finals week all nighter. Now I spend my breaks in Homewood wandering aimlessly, hoping to find an empty chair in the library or a desk in the corner of Levering Hall. What used to be a regular Saturday morning walk to my local grocery store has been replaced by a hunt for a new grocery store, followed by meandering through unfamiliar aisles while I try to relearn how to shop in a layout that feels foreign.
Neuroscience tells us that our neurons have a gradually decreasing responsiveness to constant stimuli. The overwhelming amount of information in your environment at all times means that your brain learns to ignore what is constant, filtering out the steady stream to focus on what is novel. Maybe that is why I never noticed the invisible scaffolding that gave my life structure until it was gone. The persistent rhythm whose faltering now leaves behind a silence that deafens.
However, as with all vacuums, something else always rises to fill the gap. As this city grows in familiarity, a new structure is slowly emerging to support my life here. I have started to punctuate my Tuesday nights under the lights of Homewood Field playing flag football with my ChemBE team and my Sunday mornings running through the forested cover along San Martin Drive. I’ve found a quiet auditorium in Hodson Hall where I do my best thinking, I am getting to know the vendors at the 32nd Street Farmers Market and Apple Maps is slowly becoming an infrequent cameo.
These routines branch out like roots that I hope can anchor my life as seamlessly as the familiarities of Minnesota once did. Perhaps some day these, too, will fade in the background — invisible until their presence is revealed by their absence once more. But the inhibitory effect of leaving Minnesota has revealed to me the vital function of these quiet constants, gifting me with a new appreciation for what I too often looked past. So for now, while these daily minutiae are still salient, I shall treasure them with the rose-colored glasses of novelty. After all, if moving has taught me anything, it is that life is not held together by big transitions or grand achievements, but rather the quiet, everyday details that scaffold together everything in between.
Jason Chang is a graduate student from Woodbury, Minn. studying Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering. His column is a celebration of the quiet moments that linger amidst the jumble of our busy lives: moments of stillness, reflection and a space to just exist.
