I'm Major Jackson, and this is the slowdown.

It's the time of Bloomy.

Outside my window, students make their way. It's a time of blooming.

Outside my window, students make their way to classes.

Cherry blossom petals christened their walk.

Almost my whole adult life has been spent on picturesque college campuses like this one.

Well-manicured lawns, pop-up tulip gardens,

and perfectly trimmed walkways with not a weed in sight.

The sense of order is allegorical.

These expanses of green convey the illusory spirit of a rational and ordered world. One where learning is an ideologically safe undertaking.

To learn is a preordained path to self-discovery and functional knowledge.

A carefully fertilized landscape does not hint at the messiness of experimentation, exploration, and even protests, though I know it exists, nor the context by which learning takes place.

Often the serene nature of such cultivated settings belies a planet full of conflict and in disarray.

To stroll on campus is to follow in the footsteps of generations of young people who also sought answers.

Back in the day, before the dominance of handheld tech, the walk between the halls of learning and the library and a professor's office, perhaps possessed grander symbolism.

It spoke to the monastic roots of being a student. We were literally on the path. Now it seems we are mostly in rabbit holes, matrices of mind data, which is why I love to encounter desire

lines, a term coined by landscape architects for those unplanned footpaths that result out

of need and will, those worn down patches of grass and dirt.

They look unruly, but they are evident of the irrefutable nature of human agency,

curiosity, and will.

Desire lines signify resistance.

They represent a disruptive appetite, a thirst, a wish.

...