My favorite part of the trek to Waterman, pictured before the sun started setting at 5 p.m. every day. (Aliana Mediratta | Managing News Editor)

On any given night, if you ask me to pick one of the best parts of my day, I am liable to talk about my walk home from campus. I live on Waterman Boulevard, which is basically the Narnia of off-campus housing even though it’s only a mile and a half away. It takes roughly 20 minutes from the moment I step out of my door to when I sit down in  McMillan for my 10 a.m., which feels like an hour now that it’s starting to get chilly out. 

On that walk home, there’s something magical about how the sun hits the pale pink stones as it sets from the west side of campus, how the air changes as it hits November. Through this semester, my second to last here, I have tracked the progression of the weeks through these walks, reminding myself that the number of days I have left in this place is constantly dwindling. 

During my junior year, I lived in an apartment on Washington Ave. Even though it was significantly closer to campus than my current house, I drove much more regularly. Maybe it was the shiny new appeal of finally having a car in St. Louis — reminiscent of how grown up I had felt when I first got my license. Maybe it was due to a litany of other reasons: it was too cold or rainy, or I was chronically late and needed the two minutes that driving would save me. But I believe that the real reason was much simpler — I got into the habit, and I never got out. It became routine to grab my car keys from my bedside table each morning. 

Maybe, you’re reading this thinking to yourself, “Aliana, I would never drive to campus because I have my life together, and this advice is niche and inapplicable to me.” To that, I say: you’re probably right. But I know there are some of you out there who default to driving when walking is a perfectly viable option. And I know, there are plenty of logical explanations for why you shouldn’t drive to campus: paying for parking gets expensive, driving increases your carbon footprint, you could be saving the gas in your tank for more exciting outings, the list goes on. 

But I’d rather opt for the emotional appeal because, at the end of the day, that’s what made me reconsider the pattern I fell into last year. It’s true, I may not enjoy my slog to campus each morning when I wish I were still half-asleep in bed. But I’ve had some of my most beautiful, wow-I-really-go-to-school-here moments on walks back from campus in the afternoons. Some of my best reflections and revelations have come from having that time to myself to process what I spent all day listening to in class. I’ve noticed new spots on campus and quite literally stopped to smell the roses, or in this case, the sweetgrass outside of Hillman. I run into friends and friends-of-friends and class crushes. I see more dogs per week on average and definitely get sucked into a greater number of hacky-sack circles than I ever thought possible. 

This advice is about more than deciding whether to drive your car each day — it’s all the small decisions you make about how to spend your time. In this issue of Housing Guide, we pose the question, what makes a house into a home? I may be talking about a sprawling campus rather than a two-bedroom apartment, but what really makes this place feel like home is all those tiny things I only notice when I stop, slow down, and start to take it in. Put the car keys away. It’s worth the extra 15 minutes of your day. It just might end up being your favorite part.