I found this saved from this spring. I want to post it and make a follow up in a couples days about what life is like in the unknown. This blog never got posted and it feels strangely right to read it and post it now. Enjoy.
Or at least this is the classic romantic way to view graduation. I feel a sense of sadness for saying goodbye and a sense of excitement for what's next, but moreover it just feels like another day in the life. The last year flew by faster than a bat out of hell, and in a sense I really do think it went by before i knew it. Being so caught up in the fast paced life that is the college student led me away from the harsh reality that life would forever be changed, and that I would never again be in school, or experience the excitement of a class crush, or the anxiety of a final. That chapter has closed and no matter how many times i go back to school or how many classes I take, I am no longer a college student.
What I mean by that is that in college, high school, middle school, and hell, even elementary school we experience a deep camaraderie with our peers. We share a mascot, a fight song, a campus, and a smelly professor obsessed with the sexual behavior of chimpanzees. But now that is lost in the history of my youth, and although I can be a student all my life, I will never again be a student. I have begun the age of adulthood, which supposedly lasts until 65.
In hindsight I feel as though I missed out on the experience of graduation, and it took graduation to make me realize that. Don't get me wrong, I still had some kind of super human ability to live free of inhibitions, to love recklessly, act out of character, and partake in any and every event that I could; but this was a fleeting feeling and lacked the significance it merited. Perhaps it was due to my over-commitment and busy schedule, or maybe it was my incessant need to have some extravagant adventure in the works which keeps my eyes on the future and away from the present. Whatever the reason, i don't think that i fully understood the change at hand, and although I'm sure it will hit me someday, today it is just a day in the life. I don't really live with, or believe in regrets, but doing it again I would put a larger emphasis on the people around me, and a little less on me.
Life is too short, live wild. In all of those teen movies where Michael Cera is trying to get laid or a pathetic Jason Biggs feels the real joy of a granny smith, I see a bunch of repetitive, stupid and sometimes funny immature jokes, which all seem the same regardless of which movie. However, I also can't help but feel that familiar sense of sentiment about a part of life being over, where you leave a world of friends and the familiar for the unknown. For as much as I hate to admit it, damn it, those movies for the uncreative solicit some part of my emotion. I just think it's too bad that my own graduation didn't do the same. Isn't that pathetic, I felt a greater sense of departure the first time I watched American Pie than i did at my own graduation. My unsolicited advice is this, live in the moment, live wild, love recklessly, and dive deeper into your life at hand than you think possible.
With much peace and love,
Tony
