You shouldn’t go to college. I had just walked in the door from practice and was carefully placing my grimy, wet, snow-covered soccer bag in the corner of the mudroom, recounting my day to my mother when she said it.

It was twelve hours after I had woken up and immediately started taking notes on a Minnesota State Senate hearing on Legacy Amendment Financing (the most exciting topic in the world, believe me). Eleven hours before I held my phone in one hand on a legislative strategy call while carefully ensuring my 2002 Honda Civic wasn’t slipping on the snow and ice as I drove to school. Five hours after I had just finished testifying to the House Education Committee, and four hours after, I had almost cried from embarrassment at the questioning I had received. No, teaching the Bible will not solve climate change. It was three hours before I laced up my gray and red cleats and one hour after my body nearly gave out making one last slide tackle. It was fifteen minutes after sitting in my car, too tired even to fathom getting out of the seat and making the three-second walk back inside with three different backpacks strapped across my shoulders. It was two minutes after I slipped my shoes off and began recounting the story of my day to my mother, standing over the stove stirring my favorite meal, lentil, lime, kale and sweet potato curry over brown rice. You shouldn’t go to college. 

It was quite a statement from the woman who had spent twelve years after graduating high school collecting degrees and formalizing her education. What do you have left to learn, just go work. I made up some random excuse about how there was still so much to grasp, but she wasn’t wrong. If her words weren’t enough, the letter from my school warning of truancy due to skipping class for work made it clear what I valued. At this point, I saw no value in finishing high school strong. I had already been accepted into Stanford, and as long as I didn’t flunk out, who cared? Instead of school, I became obsessed with making an impact. How can I create change? How can I make my community better? How can I make myself feel good about what I have accomplished? Every decision centered on the ability to reproduce tangible impacts on my surrounding world. From skipping classes, missing out on senior-year occasions and panic applying to colleges in Minnesota because I would have more ‘impact’ remaining at home, it dominated my life. 

But I believed going to Stanford would allow me to make the most change. I like to imagine a secondary timeline where the impact mindset took over in another way, and I am sitting in my house in Minnesota getting off a 9-5, but that’s beside the point. By the end of the summer, I had resigned to the excitement of college. More importantly, however, the summer became a moment of pause. The days became languid. Instead of a mad rush, mornings turned into slow cups of coffee and walks with my hyper-energetic dog. The spring of tests, essays, policy memos, and committee hearings turned into a summer of lakeside picnics and late-night conversations. In an instant, and without much expectation, my tangible impact dissipated. To fill the void that had been driving my life for years, I decided that I could change myself. So, what does every high-achieving teenager do once they lose the pressures of school? Rediscover a love of reading lost since 5th grade. 

The summer between senior year and my first year at Stanford became the summer of reading (a theme I had picked up from my mother’s insistence that every summer has a theme. 2012 was famously the summer of hygiene). While I read numerous fascinating books, one has stuck with me ever since. With its elegant white paperback cover, I first read Braiding Sweetgrass in a hammock beside Bde Maka Ska. I flipped the pages to chapter fifteen, Mishkos Kenmagwen: The Teachings of Grass, just as the sun began to set and a golden light reflected off the IDS tower in downtown Minneapolis. 

I was transported to Kimmerer’s waters in upstate New York, where alongside other scientists, she took measurements of the harvest, hoping to understand the diminishing returns of sweetgrass crops. I was transfixed by her description of the differences between a scientifically optimal harvest, using data on the optimal soil and water conditions, and the Indigenous methods, using the teachings of the honorable harvest. As someone already questioning the role of a formalized education versus experiential knowledge, the simplicity of her dichotomization entranced me. Kimmerer’s examples showed how sometimes the experiential mode of education has significant advantages over the formalized way of absorbing and applying knowledge. The impact of experiential and non-formalized education was, in fact, greater. 

Other essays from Braiding Sweetgrass center on rethinking knowledge and retraining our minds to think outside of the frames of western scientific knowledge and formalized structures of learning and acting. However, while my initial conclusions from Braiding Sweetgrass centered around the critical lens we can place on formal education and my embracing of experiential and traditional knowledge, when reflecting on my reading, Braiding Sweetgrass taught me an immense deal about value. While reading, I realized the fragility of the internal debate I was pushing on myself. I was stuck stressing about which educational system would produce the biggest societal impact, a formalized or experiential, and challenging the conclusion that formalized education is best when instead, I should have been digging deeper. I should have been asking if “impact” is the right measure for the value of an education. For the sweetgrass harvest, it is not the experience of harvesting for native communities that caused more impact than scientific knowledge. It is the value of the relationship between humans, their communities, and the world around them rather than the individualistic mindset that led to a more plentiful harvest. It was innate value in one another, the world around us, and the intention of learning from our connections — the idea of collectively producing and sharing knowledge rather than individually extracting it. 

When we do nothing, we never know what will hit us. We may never pick up the random book on the shelf with the pretty canvas cover. We may never shift our entire value system and reflect upon the course of life and the role of “impact” and relationships. It reminds me that when I stop obsessing about running thousands of miles per hour, everything becomes still and the actual complications of life emerge. Whether it’s college, education, money, or more, a runner’s high makes us focus on a constant pros and cons debate, and instead, I want to focus on what question I’m asking in the first place. I don’t know if the best way to make an impact is in a formalized or experiential education, and honestly, I don’t care. I don’t know if the value of education is in relationships, but I want to have that conversation. I want to continue diving into the soup of why rather than the checklist of how. Hopefully, my education will let me do that, at least.