Thoughts from someone who thinks too much

My philosophy class this semester has got me feeling a certain way — namely, outraged, furious and thoroughly nonplussed. Taught by a 300-year-old white professor who suspiciously resembles Aristotle himself, the class contends this week with Zeno’s paradox of motion.

Walking across a room, as Zeno describes, requires walking half the distance to the other side of the room, followed by half the remaining distance, followed by half of the rest and continuing into an infinite number of actions. Since time is finite, as Zeno reasons, it is impossible to complete that infinite number of actions to create movement. Therefore, motion is an illusion.

At first, I can’t relate much to yet another ancient Greek philosopher spouting his thoughts thousands of years ago. But while human experience has proven Zeno wrong (spoiler alert: motion is real), Zeno’s observation seems not physically but psychologically relevant to life at USC.

The first semester of my freshman year vanished in between dining hall visits, club meetings and Daily Trojan opinion articles. And I’m already starting to count down the rest of my time here. Meanwhile, the list of things to do before the end continues to grow — like Zeno’s paradox, I find myself with an increasingly infinite number of steps to take and a more evidently finite amount of time to finish them in.

I could be overstating. I could be high-strung. Or I could just be annoyingly ambitious. But I don’t think I’m alone. In the years leading up to USC, we’ve shaped so many of our experiences with the eventual collegiate goal in mind. And now that we’re here, each moment during “the best days of your lives” is precious — a cry to protect the ephemeral fun of university life and avoid the existential crises that thinking about the future will surely entail.

I’d like to revise Zeno’s paradox, as it applies to my USC experience. I’d concede that there are an increasingly infinite amount of goals to accomplish, but though I only have four years, my time is, just like Zeno’s distance, divisible into an infinite number of intervals. I choose to view my time as infinitely useful, and it’s my choice now to swallow my anxiety, turn off the time bomb and seize the literal infinity of opportunities awaiting me.

Sonali Seth is a freshman majoring in political science. Her column, “Sonacrates,” runs Tuesdays.