Jordan Budrevich: Pots in need of filling

Imagine a pot made of brown clay, not extraordinary in appearance, certainly not anything you would pick out of a line up. It has no designated purpose. You could fill it with a bouquet of your favorite flowers and some water, and it would become a vase. You could pour hot coffee into it, forever staining the interior of the pot with the faint taste of coffee, and it would become a mug. You could even paint it, covering the outside with swirling colors of any hue, and it would become a piece of art.

The pot is just a pot until you make use of it, until you fill it with something, and then it becomes unique, its own object that serves a distinct purpose.

The second verse of the eleventh section of the Tao Te Ching, one of the main texts of the Taoist doctrine, states that “[c]lay is fired to make a pot. The pot’s use comes from emptiness.” Regardless of religious beliefs, there is wisdom in these words. Many other objects’ uses come from their emptiness: buildings are empty until we fill them with rooms, rooms are empty until we fill them with people, people are empty until we fill them with knowledge.

Yes, we too, college students, are similar to empty clay pots. Sure, all throughout grade school and high school, we were riddled with knowledge. We had to memorize fact after fact, without questioning, and we became excellent regurgitations — able to write entire essays on what our teachers wanted to hear, rather than on what we actually believed.

Individual thoughts and ideas were discouraged. “I want you to be able to think for yourself,” teachers would claim, so long as your thoughts stayed within the rigid structure set up by the state curriculum. We formed opinions, of course, and to us it seemed a happy coincidence that all of our beliefs were in line with the beliefs of those around us, and not evidence of our isolation and closed-mindedness. But the knowledge that we were filled with drained away, because we were not invested, not interested.

So, as is the way the school system works, by the end of our senior year, we were forced to make decisions that would influence the course of our lives. Pots containing extraneous knowledge and half-formed opinions were forced to select colleges and declare majors that they knew relatively little about. “Why are you in engineering?” “Because I’m good at math and science.” “My mother was a biology major, so I’m going to be biology major.” “I’m going into business for the money.”

Unfortunately, I’ve heard all of these responses and more when talking to my friends about majors that they were going to start in. Who could blame them, though? We have been ridiculously ill-prepared to make decisions on what we want to do for the rest of our lives, especially at the ripe young age of 18. No wonder 50 percent of college students change their majors at least once.

Even for the pots that had begun to fill themselves before they got to college, delving into topics that interested them on their own time, forming opinions based on their own ideals and beliefs, college is going to come as a bit of a culture shock.

For someone like me, coming from a small, private Christian high school in Northeast Ohio, college throws a lot of new ideas, beliefs, and information in your face as soon as you set foot on campus. Gone are the days where everyone thinks along the same train of thought. If you are going to be able to survive here, you need to be able adapt and digest a lot of new information quickly.

College, and particularly the University of Toledo, is a place where a lot of different people from a lot of different backgrounds come together in the pursuit of knowledge. Here, you will encounter ideas you have never even contemplated, or you will have discussions with others who think that the ideals you consider standard are as crazy as shaving off all of your hair and dyeing your eyebrows green.

The key to becoming yourself — to discovering who you are and where your interests lie — is to be able to take in ideas, talk to other people and contemplate their opinions and decide whether or not you are going to accept them for yourself. You do not need to accept every thought that someone tosses your way, but certainly you should at least consider it. Aristotle stated, “it is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”

You are not bound to who you were in high school, you are not bound to who anyone thinks you are, or thinks you should be. You are bound only to yourself. So take a Chinese cooking class, talk to someone from a different religion or major and ask your professor their opinion on a book or a movie.

It is impossible for one person to form every thought and idea on their own, so branch out and talk to as many people as you can, so that you can start to form your own thoughts and become your own person, not the person you were told you would become as you grew up. Parents and teachers may have meant well, but who you’ll be is not really up to them. It’s up to you.

While we may all start out as simple, clay pots, we alone can decide what we fill ourselves with and who we become. Some of us are vases, some of us are mugs, some of us are art — but all of us are useful.

Jordan Budrevich is a first-year majoring in bioengineering.