dragonbook

10 you know what? It's not so automatic at all. Why? Because there is one thing here that students find it very, very hard to get used to. Something absolutely dreadful. History professors? No. Far worse than that--and far more frightening. It's freedom. You are going to be free at Northern in a way that you've never been before and probably will never be again. No one will tell you that you have to go to class. No one will tell you how to spend your time. No one will tell you exactly what subjects to take, or what to major in. You basically will run your own life. Now being free should be a wonderful thing. Martin Luther King's "I have a dream speech closes with the dramatic words, "Free at last. Free at last. Thank God Almighty, I'm free at last." But freedom isn't any good if you don't know what to do with it. The Israelites longed to go back to Egypt. Even many freed black slaves wanted to go back to the old plantations. One of the French novelist Andre Gide's characters says, "This useless freedom tortures me." And the freedom you have at college may be, in some ways, a torture. Partly, this is because it's difficult sometimes to do what you know you should do. It's hard to force yourself to get up for classes when there's nobody making you do it. It's hard to force yourself to study when there's a card game going on. But even if you're making all the right choices, freedom is hard--because even the right choices don't always seem to pay off as they should. One of the really disturbing things about Stanford for me was the realization that most of those things one might think would bring happiness don't. We had in our little dorm an Olympic gold medalist, the captain of the U.S. Olympic gymnastics team, a Fulbright Scholar, a Rhodes Scholar: bright kids, kids with all sorts of talents. What they all had in common was an