OPINION
Being brave, Duke and beyond
By Janie Booth | May 2, 2019We can show up and listen to each other. We can let each other in on secrets. We can admit when we don’t know the answer.
We can show up and listen to each other. We can let each other in on secrets. We can admit when we don’t know the answer.
At Duke, you’ll find secrets everywhere you look: in the faces of gargoyles hiding beneath Gothic arches, whispered between students on the bus, buried in the Chapel crypt.
On Saturday, just as the warmth of the day gave way to a cool breeze, I walked around Sarah P. Duke Gardens.
In the fall of my junior year, I found my legs dangling from the exam table of a doctor’s office explaining symptoms of nausea that wouldn’t go away.
“Are you the shy one or the talkative one?”
One hundred and sixty-eight years ago this January, Leo Tolstoy wrote what is possibly the greatest diary entry of all time. It read:
Duke will start to feel like home slowly at first. Then, all at once, you offhandedly refer to going ‘back home’ during winter break of your first year, to which your mom casts you a look of confusion and disappointment. “You are at home,” she says.
If you’ve ever knelt down to pick up a stray fortune cookie fortune littered on the ground, or gotten your knees dirty to search for a four-leaf clover in the grass, then you know the feeling that I’m talking about.
“Why don’t you look it up for homework today?” was the response of my elementary school teacher whenever I raised my hand with a question too big to answer.
In the Senate confirmation hearing of Judge Brett Kavanaugh, one word was mentioned more than others.