Graduate

So I graduated today. I took my last final a few days ago, and things went a little different than I had expected. I figured that the last day of college, this wild 4.5 year experiment, would end with some sort of fanfare, or cosmic boom, or at least something climactic. But to my surprise, after I finished my final, nothing happened. No band played. No celestial voice from heaven said, “this is my son, of whom I am well pleased” as I had expected. There was just silence. The weight of what had just happened began to set in, but still nothing happened. I stepped outside, the birds were still chirping, the sun still shone, students still walked from here to there, not one person stopped to say “wow man, you look different, you look like a college grad, an educated man of the world!” So I walked around outside for a minute, and thought out loud, “boy, life sure is a son-of-a-bitch!” I soon tempered myself, and walked back to my car in an uneventful, anticlimactic, bitter huff of sorts. So I began to think, and it helped me to think of life not so much as a series of sudden, life-altering events, but more as a sort of continuous, fluid thing. Like life is just meant to go from one thing to the next without seeming like the death of one thing leads to the life of another. I have this friend, and she has always been kind of crazy, nothing has ever stopped her from doing whatever weird or crazy things she has wanted to do. I just talked to her today after she got back from a trip to Australia, and she was telling me about how excited she was about graduating soon and moving to California where she plans to get married. I told her that I thought it was funny how different our respective ideologies were, about how unnerving the future is for me. Then she just told me, in this super matter-of-fact way, that she loves change, and wouldn’t have it any other way. It makes me wonder what it takes for someone to get into that mindset, to be willing to go anywhere or do anything at a moment’s notice. To, in a way, live without fear. Well there is no doubt about it, this is a new, scary phase of life for me. And now that college is behind me, there is only the future, the distant unknown. Well, here is to the future, whatever it may hold, may they be great things, and may they be things that will light some fire deep within my soul.