college senior ponderings

With an exhausted sigh that tastes of denial, I breathe slower--the finals, the classes, the four years behind me.

This end feels like a beginning and a middle and it is and it isn't. A college collage of ripped papers and crafted dreams and shining hopes and already fading memories. My eyes are wells sometimes and I don't always know quite how to feel.

I wrote a speech for graduation--I didn't get chosen, which was honestly more of a relief than a disappointment. And perhaps it was meant to be prose on a page; it seems better in black and white than in vocal chords. These are parts pieced together with my own thoughts that float like Monet's water lilies to the surface.

We began in autumn, the leaves burning like brilliant fires, do you remember? We conclude now in our own autumn, and we are the leaves, burning brilliant, ready to be released into the winds of the world.  If you listen closely to the rustling of robes and whispers like leaves, you’ll be able to tell. We have grown, and are readily not ready for the impending seasons of this life. For who is ever ready for what is to come? 

So many days, so many ordinary moments. If we look closely, they were the truest stuff of this journey, the seemingly small decisions that have brought us to this ending. And the people--they were perhaps the most important part. My friends are not celebrities, but I have had the privilege to know them, a privilege I count more valuable than knowing all the famous and rich in the world. 

I am so grateful for these people, these years. 

I was not always grateful—grey days come to our lives as easily as they come to Ohio. We plodded through the rain, the snow, and maybe, just maybe those grey days were the most important days, those days forgotten but as real as this day. Why? Because we walked on. If you sit here, you pushed through difficult assignments, hard life decisions, maybe illness, fatigue, mysterious motivation crises, and a hundred other shadows. Those days lie to us, and we were almost convinced that this day would never come.

It is the small steps that take us to the future as we keep lifting and dropping our feet to the ground that spreads ahead like a massive world. Lifting and dropping, never giving up. 

These are not all my thoughts on this time. Not even a fraction. But these are the simple thoughts that are those water lilies on the surface of my mind the night I finished my last final of undergraduate college. 

“There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind,” commented C.S. Lewis. Perhaps a bit hard to believe this at the moment. But I think it is so. 

A final thought: God has been faithful through each grey day, and I never would have made it without Him.