I was a Lawn Resident my fourth year at UVA. In fact, I was the Head Resident on the Lawn. What is the meaning of this, you ask? Did I sleep in a tent on a grassy knoll every night? No. Well, I must have had my own special chair, one of those high-back Adirondacks, on a courtyard, right? Wrong. Being “on the Lawn” meant that I lived in a matchbox single room with ancient electrical wiring. I walked outside to use the bathroom, even in the middle of the night (though some may choose to argue this point). During the winters, I tread through 4 inches of snow in my bathrobe and flipflops to get to the showers. When it wasn’t winter, I endured the embarrassment (or was it glory and pride?) of walking through high-traffic zones with wet, freshly-shampooed hair wearing my plush, terry-cloth robe, bought expressly for that purpose.

So what is this Lawn?

The Lawn is a pivotal concept without which undergraduate life at UVA would be worlds apart from what it is today. The Lawn pits students against each other extracurricularly from the moment they step on Grounds. It feuds a competition to see who can rack up the most credentials outside of the classroom while still keeping a decently high GPA. It plants seemingly life-or-death goals in students’ minds as they each strive to gain his/her peers’ highest ratings on the fuzzy criteria of “significant contributions to the University community.” All in the name of one letter, mailed from the housing office, that reads “Congratulations! You are one of 47 distinguished students selected to live on the Lawn.”

So, why do I bring this up now?

Recently, I was asked by a fellow 2004 Lawn resident to dig up information on a girl, our year, who claimed to have received a “congratulations” letter, but ultimately never lived on the Lawn because she turned down the offer before the school year began. My friend suspected that this girl was lying, but had no proof, so he checked with me, the Head Resident. The girl was lying.

As good little graduates of the University all know, lying is an Honor offense that leads to automatic expulsion. But what is the meaning of lying about the Lawn AFTER graduating? Or even better, what is the meaning of the Lawn itself after graduating?

In all honesty, the Lawn means nothing after UVA. Non-Virginians laugh and laugh about the idea of “sleeping in someone’s front yard”. Furthermore, the whole concept of intense extracurricular competition so engrained in us wahoos means about as much as German sausages to everyone else: foreign, and probably bad for your health when ingested in large quantities.

So what changed about the Lawn after we graduated that demoted it from “this means the whole world to me” to “this means nothing at all” in a mere year or two? The tiny rooms are still there, with its brick exteriors, cobwebs, and a different set of over-achieving residents inside.

So, why does it feel different?

It feels different because we have lost the context of the Lawn. Some meanings are universal, no doubt: lying means doing something wrong, or having a cold means not feeling so great for a few days. Most things, however, only have meanings in context. Honor is vague in the minds of most, but Honor means precisely “no lying, cheating, or stealing” to Virginia students and alums. NASA means the space agency to most Americans, but for a select group, it may mean the Native American Student Association. For just about everyone, the lawn is what you hire the neighbor’s son to mow, but the Lawn is the Holy Grail of achievements at UVA. How we interpret the context around us is important, as is finding the context for which our thoughts are even relevant. That seems obvious enough, no astrophysics degree needed here. (At this point, I’m almost tempted to launch into something on the Tipping Point’s third rule: Power of Context. But I shall refrain in the interest of length.)

So where am I going with this?

To generalize, and at the risk of sounding terribly obvious: we find the meanings for things around us in our surroundings. Most things lose their significance given a different context, which really should not come as a surprise. I think what I have failed to understand until very recently is how incredibly universal this idea is. (Oh the irony: the universality of specific context.) As my mother always says: 退一步，海阔天空。 Literally, it means to “take a step back, the sea and the sky are expansive”. Contexually, it means to take a step back, see the big picture. Taking a step back and seeing the big picture has made all the difference for me in 2005: helping me to go from “I am so f-ing miserable, I want another life” to “I can live with this; this really isn’t so bad.” The universal meanings are still there, and always will be: life goes on; but the contextual meanings are only what I make of them. Not everything can, or should, be trivialized, but just about everything can be contexualized so we can forgive ourselves a little more than we have been allowing ourselves to.

With that, here’s to 2006: the year of opportunities, of meanings, and when put into the right context: the year of the dog!