I will make my education my salvation, just as Merton says. College is the best environment I’ve found yet to discover who I am, and I would be remiss not to use it to its full potential. Bearing in mind the distinction between true freedom and the insipid freedom to choose between several meaningless options, I’ll make my choices and actions count.

University education, for me, is a field of choices. Some of them are superficial, some of them are vastly important. In this sense, education is a testing ground, a place to learn how to choose and choose with meaning. Because even avoiding the choice is a choice in itself, I won’t try to avoid the insignificant decisions. But I’ll make sure to choose and act, for every important decision I have to make.

Merton says this is a way for me to discover myself, to identify who it is that chooses. I agree. Part of this will mean identifying why it is that I choose the way I do, and how I make the choices that matter.

My reasons for the decisions that I make, even in this first semester, have become important, and more mysterious to me than they’ve ever been. Where earlier I wondered idly why I would choose to sleep through a class, now I see that it’s incredibly significant and I wonder about it deeply. There’s a vast amount to explore in my own self than I ever suspected, and now is the perfect time.

And even the ways that I choose are important. Which class do I value more, calculus or computer science? Computer science would make sense, I suppose. But how often do I go to computer science, and how often do I go to calculus? Why? By making a simple, seemingly small choice like how I spend 50 minutes on Wednesday afternoons, and by making that choice 15 times in a semester or 120 times in 4 years, I will have made a very large choice about what matters to me.

The important part, then, is that I make that choice consciously - that I see the choice, understand what it means, and see what it says about me that I choose my calculus homework over a CS lecture almost half the time. I can’t pretend to see that every time. I didn’t see what this particular choice meant to me until a paragraph ago, and that’ll happen again and again and again in my life. But to me, and I think in a way that Thomas Merton would have approved of, this alone is salvation. In this examination, I’m confronting the terrifying image of myself, the unholy reality that I’m deeply imperfect in some ways - and, God help me, the surety that I am perfect in other ways.

I’ll use my education in exactly this way. It will be a place for me to un-learn fear, both fear of making a choice and fear of seeing myself in my entirety. I’ll never have to worry about any hell of meaninglessness if I can teach myself now to make a lucid and conscious use of my freedom, and thereby become alive.