Some days, as I walk along the familiar paths and take in the well-worn sights of campus, I find myself thinking, “Only two months left.” This thought circulates through my mind relentlessly as I stumble blindly into the midpoint of my final semester. I’ve spent years telling myself that this was what I’d been wanting, that life would really start and everything I’ve been missing would surely fall into place as I finish my time here at the University of Maine.
It’s funny how something like a graduation seems impossibly far away until the moment comes and you find yourself staring down the barrel of the rest of your life. In my first two years here, I spent so little time looking around. All I could think about was the future, the apartment I didn’t have, the classes I couldn’t yet take and the friendships I was waiting to find. When I talk to friends and family who are just beginning their time in college, I sometimes hear that same sense of impatient dissatisfaction in their voices. It is so easy to be cynical when you’re certain there are many great things to come, yet it is so difficult to place stock in the irreplaceable charm of a new beginning.
In the imagination of my adolescence, four years seemed to stretch out as both a lifetime and nothing at all. During my first fall in Orono, despite my best efforts, I could hardly have imagined what my life would look like now. Leaving seemed to be such a distant prospect I was almost certain it would never come. In that sense of perceived permanence, it is easy to let the burden of action fall upon the uncertain future. You let yourself put off joining that club, finding that internship or befriending the interesting strangers you see on campus. When you’re sure there is always more time, taking action feels unnecessary. This may sound like bogus advice from someone who can barely legally drink, yet these are the things I wish I could’ve appreciated a mere three years ago.
I have always found myself itching for a “purpose,” for a new home, a new state, a new job and a new outlook on life, yet it wasn’t until my junior year that something started to click. I remember looking around my apartment and seeing the faces of many people, people I care deeply about. I saw animated conversations, heads tilted back in laughter, music, wild gesticulations and a sense of living jubilation which permeated throughout that room.
Through whatever twists of fate, coincidence and chance, life had occurred such that these people were my people. They were people from all walks of life, all different and strange in their own ways. These were people whose doors I could knock on at any hour and feel welcome. In the throes of a life built around schoolwork, little else seems to matter more than holding close the friendships that we foster in the fictitious pseudoreality of the university setting. Often full of arbitrary stress and seemingly menial work, it was on that night that I truly knew that we subsisted off of the ties we hold to one another. What will really matter a decade down the line was in that room.
So now, as I face an uncertain future, I find myself holding onto these small moments. I find myself wondering if fate will grant me another community like this one, if I will find satisfaction, camaraderie and a purpose that can last a lifetime. I have no answers, yet I know that what I have now is something worth appreciating, and there would be nothing more tragic than realizing that too late.
