Remember college? Showing up that first day on campus feeling excited, unsure but fearless in the face of your new life laid out in front of you like a brochure, grand stone buildings and fall leaves on the ground, parents dropping off boxes, tearful and jubilant farewells. Everyone you meet a potential new friend. Staying up all night discussing the world, confident that your views were as developed as they’d ever be, open-minded but surefooted in your still green beliefs, things based in hearsay but lacking in experience. College was the best of both worlds, where childhood lack of responsibility meets adult freedom and the world is like a buffet of options to pick and choose from. A new best friend, a new lover, a new one night stand; a new major, a new club, a new direction in life. Never knowing that life couldn’t possibly stay this free, feel this limitless. How could we know that it wouldn’t always be this easy to start over, this easy to make friends, find soul mates, fall on our faces and have the youthful resilience to get back up again, put ourselves out there at the mercy of the world and risk the pain that may ensue for the triumph of finally (possibly) getting it right. Back when failures and disappointments were still the exception, and not the paralyzing rule. Before we understood that life wasn’t always the perfectly crafted result of planning and preparation, doing the right thing (most of the time) and just really wanting something. If you try hard, if you go to church every Sunday, if you do the work and be a “good person”, you’ll get the life you always knew you’d have, the one you wanted, the fulfillment of the American dream that you were promised before anyone knew that it would cease to exist before you even got your shot at it. Yes college. The last hoorah. Does life get better after it? In a million ways, of course. But is there ever again that same sense of open-ended hope, of limitless expectations free of the fear of having fallen short before? Without the understanding that things just might not look better in the morning after a good night’s sleep like mom used to say? I liken myself in college to having had an almost weightless existence, though it seemed heavy with importance at the time. And while back then it was – relatively speaking – it now seems to have been worry-free and rose-tinted after years of living in the “real world”; a harsher place with no safety net, no smorgasbord of consequence-free choices to make, no pool of potential friends and suitors to choose from, the realization that you might end up somewhere that isn’t where you planned. It was standing on the edge of a cliff and believing the only possibility was to take off in flight and never to fall. I remember college. Fondly, and wistfully. If only we had known when we were in it, we might’ve appreciated it a bit more, taken the hard parts less seriously, relished in that buoyant existence just a little more. But I’ll settle for having lived in it, truly, and for remembering it for exactly what it was; college.
RyanWritesDaily 