There are parts of college you prepare for—the lectures, the assignments, the big ideas that ask you to rise to them. And then there are the parts no one really mentions. The in-betweens. The walks.
You know the ones. From Linsly-Chittenden down Elm. From WLH through Cross Campus, dodging chalk ads and friends from section. From Rosenkranz toward the Beinecke, watching the marble glow just a little in the afternoon sun. From the third floor of Humanities Quadrangle, where the windows are too big and the thoughts sometimes too heavy, all the way to a bench behind Branford, where you can exhale. It’s fifteen minutes at most. Ten, if you’re late. But something happens in those few blocks. Something small and strange and important.
The walk back from class is where everything settles. Where the reading you barely understood begins to make sense—not in sentences, but in impressions. A phrase that stuck. A professor’s aside. A question that won’t leave you alone. You don’t write anything down. You just walk. And in the walking, you begin to think.
Sometimes you’re alone, wrapped in your coat and your earbuds and your own spiraling thoughts. Other times, someone falls into step beside you, and you talk—about the lecture, about the weather, about something that’s not class at all. And you realize that this is what learning looks like, too. Not just sitting in rows, but walking side by side. Not just answers, but questions you carry with you, long after the classroom door clicks shut.
There’s something about Yale that makes these walks feel heavier than they are. Not burdensome—just weighted. As if the stone buildings are listening. As if the campus itself holds memory. You pass people you know, people you’ll know later, people who will only ever be faces in a crowd. But you’re all moving through the same space, each on your own path, each part of something shared.
You cross courtyards: Timothy Dwight’s with its sun-drenched archway, Saybrook’s with its quiet corners, Silliman’s stretching wide and low. You walk past the Divinity School, up Prospect if you’re ambitious, or along Hillhouse if you need to think gently. You pass through Phelps Gate, through the York Street shortcut behind the Art Gallery, or under the wrought-iron archway by the Law School where light always seems to land just right. You dodge sprinklers. You walk under trees that bloom too soon and drop leaves too fast. You see the sun flare against Harkness Tower at 5:14pm in late October, and somehow that alone makes it worth it.
And maybe that’s what the walk back is really about. Not just distance, but re-entry. Returning to your room, or your friends, or yourself, a little different than when you left. Slightly changed. Slightly more.
Because Yale is a place of movement—not just in schedule, but in becoming. We are always in transit, even when we sit still. Always mid-thought, mid-chapter, mid-conversation. And those walks back from class—unguarded, unstructured, unnoticed—are where that motion becomes meaning. Where we are, quite literally, moving through what we’ve learned.
It’s easy to miss it. To rush. To stare at your phone. To let the walk become just another task between to-dos. But sometimes, when the weather is right and the light is soft and your brain is full, you notice it. You breathe differently. You feel the rhythm of your own unfolding. You’re not racing anymore. You’re arriving.
And somehow, that’s enough.
