Beginning

Commencement was a pretty strange event. I realized how much emotion - stress, frustration, etc. I'd been bottling up over the past couple of years, and after the ceremony (which was really nice), I just felt raw. Don't get me wrong - being done was and is an amazing feeling - but I realized how much pure emotion I'd been sitting on. Sunday night when I was trying to fall asleep I felt as though I were going through a breakup - it just felt like there were things unresolved, things happening too quickly, things I wanted to revisit, and things I couldn't wait to leave behind. Monday was a bit better, and by yesterday I was feeling pretty normal again.

Quite a few times over the past few years I've talked about not feeling engaged, about just feeling like I'm drifting along. Driving a lot of this was a really deep feeling of distraction - like I couldn't focus on anything because at some level, something fundamental was begging for my attention, and I wasn't comfortable doing something else until whatever that was got its attention. I'm pretty sure that that "thing" was only fear.

On a related note, my favorite part of Commencement was the very end - the charge given to graduates. We were honored to have Randy Pausch speak to us briefly about the utter importance of living life with passion. He commented about how - 9 months ago - he was told that he had 3-6 months to live, and someone made a comment to him about how he was really "beating the reaper." His response was that really, the only way anyone "beats the reaper" is by living well - living with passion, and focus. His words really hit home with me, as I think they did for all of us.

Living passionately can be scary in some ways, given the amount of openness and risk-taking, and brute honesty it involves. I would argue though that the fright associated with that is a positive thing - it lends credence to our effort, it reassures us that we have identified what really matters to us. That kind of fear seems different than the fear that distracts us, but I would argue that it's really probably not, though maybe it's directed differently. Letting go of that distraction is really important, and I realized that there's absolutely a way to avoid causing it in the first place - nothing more than staying true to one's self. That spirit of staying true is a lot more than surrounding one's self with things that make one happy or pursuing what seem like worthy causes - it's about values and ideals.

I'm really excited about the future - and I'm sad to leave the past behind. College enabled me to learn a lot that I never would have dreamed of discovering on my own, and I'll miss that environment quite a bit. At the same time, I'm feeling like I'm ready to take on something new, and see what more I can learn. (Also, I got accepted into a part-time Master's program, so I still have lots more school. Yay!)