Looking back without anything weighing on you

Giselle leaves Erasmus University to study in Leiden. In her final column for EM, she wants to look back but encounters a difficulty: Tinbergen is still closed.

The central point of Woudestein is a building that most current students have never seen from the inside. Over the past few years I, like all the other students, dutifully walked around the Tinbergen building and became less and less aware of this huge tower we were not allowed to enter. We come to campus, but we never reach its middle.

The building is named after Jan Tinbergen, a leading economist and one of the founders of econometrics. The monumental skyscraper has been closed for five years, as long as I have been studying here. First legionella was found, and then it turned out the building was not really fire safe either. Years of vacancy were followed by years of renovation. And all that time students were not allowed inside. The brutalist concrete colossus remained off limits to me.

Now that I am going to study somewhere else, I am trying to look back on the past five years I have spent on campus. But I cannot manage to get an overview. To see the university from the middle and from above, the Tinbergen building would have to open again. Looking back takes effort.

Shortly after the Tinbergen building was opened in the late 1960s, Jan Tinbergen received the first Nobel Prize for economics. Remarkably, his brother, the biologist Niko, also received a Nobel Prize a few years later. They are the only brothers who have both won a Nobel Prize.

Although brother Niko received the Nobel Prize for his observations of animal behaviour, in his Nobel lecture he spoke at length about a discipline of movement that helped him with everyday movements you make without thinking. In this so-called Alexander technique you learn to walk and sit without unnecessary tension. It also gives you very good posture. In his speech Niko Tinbergen explains how well he, his wife and daughter can sleep thanks to the technique, how good their mood is, and that the exercises even allow them to play musical instruments better. I wonder how economist Jan Tinbergen listened to this speech.

Early this year, out of curiosity, I tried these exercises myself. On Wednesday mornings I went to Ommoord, where a woman taught at home. In her living room I sat on a foam play mat belonging to her children. She kept having me make the same movement: looking over my shoulder. And then really feel everything that was happening in my body. As I looked back I moved my eyes, my neck, my chest, hips and knees. What tension was I holding on to and could I let go? We practised looking back without anything weighing on us.

From now on, Giselle will be studying in Leiden and continues as a columnist for our esteemed colleagues at Mare.