An opportunity

This concept sounds foreign, even as I type this: I’m not frightened of graduating. I’m excited.

For all of senior year, I’ve grappled to make sense of leaving university. The feeling of suddenly leaving behind the carefully constructed constructs that have carried us for nearly two decades is disturbing, because, frankly, we’re being disturbed. Our whole lives are being disturbed. We’re getting yanked out of the kiddies pool and being belly-flopped into the scary deep end of adulthood to desperately doggy paddle in the currents.

It used to frighten me, the enormity of it all. The world is big. The scale is overwhelming. Look in the smallest nook and you’ll get lost in its infinite depth. To think that we’re supposed to trek out into the great big unknown and to find something to call our own seems impossible.

But now it no longer scares me because there’s purpose. To leave university means growing eyes, ears, arms, legs, feet and hands to explore the world and to find something, to make something, to master something, to identify something and to create something. It’s a blank page, a white canvas, an empty stage — it’s time to write, paint and dance.

The impetus is on us to make with it what we will.

Graduating is opportunity. It’s the irresistible exuberance of the question, “what’s next?” It’s our time to shine. It’s a chance at creating fate, for us to write the narrative as we live it. It’s not a time to feel lost without direction. It’s time for getting lost so that we can find our own direction.

That’s exciting.

The world is big and the enormity is overwhelming. But if you look inside one of its infinite nooks, you will find millions of people working and pushing, voraciously getting their hands dirty and mercilessly pounding the earth for something. The momentum builds and builds to a glorious apex: the spectacle of society.

That’s the promise of graduation: an opportunity. And that’s not frightening. It’s exciting.