All good things…
Class of 2008. Those were the words I read over and over again in 2004 as a freshman entering Assembly Hall, along with the eight thousand or so others in our bright orange “Freshmen” shirts, excited/apprehensive. The year seemed more of a concept than an actual time, really, they might have well said Class of the 22nd Century. Yet now, here we are, in September of 2008, all graduated and well into the next step of our lives. What does this all mean? Unlike the last pivotal transition (from high school to college) which I brutally documented so often, I’ve been very negligent to reflect on this one at all. Quite a shame, given how significant and unique each story is.
But it wasn’t sheer laziness that kept me from writing, oh dear readership–but I think… I needed to make sense of the whole college story before I could move onto reflecting about my present, and quite honestly, I still haven’t made all that much sense of it–especially the last… 3 years or so. School, friendships, relationships, etc… all of it was a blur that got blurrier the longer I gave. The greatest message I got though, as Frost said about life, was that “it goes on”. Whether or not I”m ready to understand the significance of what I went through during those days/months/years, more will come. And the key lesson here is, without looking back, without reflecting on the moments that our lives are made of as we experience them (or soon after), they will be forgotten, and before we know it, more days/months/and years will have gone by as well.
Well. Can’t let that happen, can I?
But if there’s another thing that I’ve learned in the last four years it’s that there is so much in life, that you lose more in the present than you could ever gain by holding onto the past. This is a very important period in my life, here in the Fall of 2008, and while I reflect on occasion to four years ago, I will continue to blog about the here and now.
So, here’s a brief cheer to everything that college was–in terms of friendships, relationships, classes, and life lessons–may we all take what we need, and move onto the next steps more learned and more prepared than we could have been without it. I’ll reflect more on the past in the days to come.