Opinion
Butterflies and Orientation Trips
By Peter Yang ’20
September 15, 2016
Tags opinion
I fell asleep on the way back from my orientation trip. As the van made its way home passing through the corn fields on both sides of the road, I relived the many incredible moments with my newly acquainted friends in dreams. All the events manifested in the form of a slideshow as I experienced torrents of emotion all over again. It was only when the trip was near its end that I realized how much I wished it could last and how it triggered an epiphany unexpectedly.
I was never an outgoing person. In fact, I dreaded the trip even before it started because I didn’t particularly enjoy group activities, especially the ones involving sleeping in a tent for four nights without showers. To survive the ordeal, I constantly made subtle suggestions to myself that it was going to end soon. I embarked on the journey with a painfully constrained attitude.
During the first two days of the trip, I began a subtle yet steady process of discovering aspects of my personality. Our trip leaders organized a series of seemingly idiotic games that require each first-year to remember other people’s names or simply hold others’ hands. I never quite understood the purpose of playing these games until I saw people open up a little bit after a few rounds of them. Gradually, they talked more. They talked about their hometowns, the high schools they went to, their dreams and life goals or just wonderful experiences they had in life. All the while we began to develop interest in lives of others, a desire to know the fascinating stories of people whose fates became accidentally intertwined with ours.
Out there in the campground, under the azure velvet decorated with patches of snowy cotton, we are slowly peeling off layers of chrysalis. We rid ourselves of one layer of social apathy and another layer of selfish lethargy. Without social media and the internet, I looked myself in the mirror and saw a face of insecurity and powerlessness. An orientation trip gave me the time and leisure to slow down a bit and reflect upon myself, to train the ability to make genuine social contacts instead of digital ones. Immersed in nature with nothing other than each other, we climbed out of our cocoons, our own worlds, and dug up the lost joy of doing simple things which we buried with our childish years.
Butterflies are social insects, yet a community of butterflies cannot exist if there are only caterpillars. Here on the Hill, we send first-years on their orientation trips in order to help them commence their life cycles as butterflies. The kids who left the school brooding like myself once considered themselves too “cool” to be socially proactive so they wrapped themselves up in a layer of silence and disinterest. Yet those same kids who came back from the trips, though weary and odorous, all have a shiny smile blooming on their faces as they walk shoulder to shoulder with their new companions. In that sense, our orientation trips are not just about loads of fun, but are also about forging a healthy personality as well as a useful skill in each one of us so we can prosper in the years to come. To me, the power of such metamorphosis is immense and it fuels me with passion to enjoy every moment and cherish the people I have come to know.
At times I would think about the night before we returned to campus, see the smiles on everyone’s faces through a screen of smoke arisen from a burning bonfire; smell the fragrance of burnt tree bark; hear the melodious ukulele songs and feel the friction between my palms as I clapped on the beat. My orientation trip is going to be the memory of a lifetime.