I used to live in the Netherlands, that small and stubborn country, which, if the sea has its way, may soon return to it, and remains the setting of some of my most formative years.
My grandmother’s 1930s duplex is situated across from a train station on the railway connecting Amsterdam and The Hague. Pressing my ear to my pillow each night, I could hear the hum of the railway, then silence from midnight to 3 a.m., the sound of ticking bicycle spokes and cooing wood doves filled my room. I was often alone, sometimes sad and frequently unsettled by a persistent anxiety about the future. These small rhythms carried an indifference that was paradoxically reassuring, and offered a form of stability that did not depend on my ability to control anything at all.
Within the restless churn of Georgetown, we ought to choose a few sustaining rhythms of our own, protect them deliberately and let them steady us against the uncertainties we cannot control. It is hard not to notice how many of us, swept up in our ambition, begin to lose our grip on these basic rhythms and neglect rest, routine and even the simple responsibility of being kind to our own bodies.
I suppose this orderly nature is why the Dutch can use schools as voting locations while classes are in progress, why trains run on time and why graffiti that appears overnight along trains is scrubbed clean by morning. Rooted in Calvinism and shaped by the practical demands of collective survival, Dutch society reflects an understanding that systems endure only when individuals adhere to shared rhythms.
This stands in contrast to a disposition, palpable at Georgetown, that tends to valorize rupture over repetition and reinvention over continuity. Like other elite institutions, its culture reflects a concentrated form of American individualism. This impulse can fuel extraordinary ambition: it allows a country to strap brilliant men and women to a rocket and send them around the moon and back again, pursuing the unprecedented with a distinctly American confidence. On the Hilltop, it takes shape in the formation of internationally oriented leaders, world-class doctors, policymakers and business leaders. At the same time, students take their baby steps in this competitive realm, vying for selective roles within layered hierarchies and internalizing that framework through extracurricular activities like The Corp, consulting clubs and other selective organizations.
Yet when this impulse becomes total, and all structure is treated as something to be transcended, it risks producing a subtle kind of fragmentation instead of freedom.
At Georgetown, where we try to live by Jesuit values (though Leo’s served meat on every Friday during Lent), there exists a resistance to this restlessness. The practices of the Jesuits suggest that attention, reflection and meaning itself depend on repetition: a deliberate return to familiar questions, the same hours and forms of discipline. Practices like the Ignatian Examen — a daily return in prayer to gratitude, reflection, and self-scrutiny through a consistent sequence of questions — reveal how the Jesuits embed regularity in their spiritual practice. The Catholic liturgical calendar also structures time into narrative, hierarchy and recurrence, giving form to the otherwise formless passage of days. It reflects a distinctly human impulse to render the unpredictable nature of life into something more manageable, though it can also be read as a faintly anachronistic, imposing older symbolic order on the disarray of modern life.
In a world whose scale and noise far exceed our capacity to meaningfully engage with it, it becomes easy to feel unmoored, stretched uncomfortably between two poles of awareness and helplessness. In response, we often reach for digestible narratives that bring us the illusion of order. By constructing a single, flawless path and mistaking it for the only viable trajectory toward a narrow notion of success, we tie our lives to an impossible Platonic form; when we miss an internship or prestigious law school admission, that ideal collapses and so, it seems, does everything else. Healthy structure orients us within uncertainty, while brittle scripts presume they can overcome it. If we attempt to control that uncertainty, we will only find ourselves more overwhelmed.
The Dutch have preserved a cultural understanding that even the most ambitious undertakings require a stable point of departure, and that without such a foundation, effort dissipates. Life itself resists linearity, unfolding instead through contingencies we cannot fully anticipate, and it is precisely for this reason that structure matters.
I try to embrace that uncertainty while still holding onto structure, accepting that life will not unfold predictably while recognizing that some rhythms are worth sustaining. Habitualize breakfast every morning with your friends, go for a jog and enjoy the wind, sit down for that coffee you like from Whisk every Wednesday — not on the go, but sit and have a moment. Read for an hour each day with your roommate as the sun sets, before you call it a night. Adequately nourish and rest your body at regular hours. Seek the beauty in the regularity that feeds your soul — because when you do, you’re far more likely to find the kind of success you’re actually seeking.
Josine Sindram is a first-year in the School of Foreign Service.
