College is a somewhat confusing time in a person’s life, when individuals find out who they are and so on. I have been experiencing a little bit of this myself.

Lately, I have been having trouble sleeping. I do not know if it is because I have a lot on my mind, or just because my roommate’s snoring sounds like a plane is landing next to me every 10 seconds.

During times like this, I go for walks to sort my thoughts, because if I stayed up any longer, I would not be able to fight the urge to smother my roommate with a pillow to stop that horrible noise.

On one of these occasions, it was nearing 5 a.m. and I still had not gotten any sleep, so I left the dorms and started walking around campus. Everything looks so much different in the early morning hours. There are no cars or people bustling around, and everything is so peaceful.

You can go any where you want and no one will bother you. When I am out at night, I feel like I have no worries. I do not have to think about deadlines or if I need to be some where. I can be one with the world and gaze up at the stars, as the entire campus is bathed in the moon’s glow.

As I was appreciating all of these things on this early morning, I came across something very strange to me: a bicycle that lacked nearly everything that makes up a bike.

It was a lone frame, no wheels or handle bars, no gears or even a shifter. Just the frame chained to a lonely post. It got me thinking about college life and change, and I thought that in a way it represented a stage in the transformation of being a freshman in college.

New students usually enter college with a full bike. As one moves forward in school, the ideals and morals that one brought along from home change in different ways. Instead of being complete, one finds that he or she has lost a wheel here, or handle bars there.

But as time goes on, one finds things out new things about the world and about oneself that were unknown before. One experiments to figure out who one really is.

I think that is a lot of what college is: finding the aspects in the world to complete your bike.

Maybe it is not that you lose things along the way, but that you are finding that you do not really need them. They are not lost, but that wheel just doesn’t run smoothly with you anymore. You decided to find a different and better wheel. The people who feel like a bike frame chained to a post are merely finding themselves.

I know that I have a ways to go to find the rest of the components to my “bike,” but I also know that at this point in my life, I don’t have to be a complete bike, and it feels good just to be in production.

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