It's that Time of Year Again...

If you’re in high school or university, you should be just finished or wrapping up your studies in the next month. It’s always such a surreal time – disbelief that the school year is over, the scramble to finish last minute assignments, the saying of goodbyes to friends for the summer (or longer), and perhaps the trepidation of moving onward to something different altogether.

For those of you who are graduating, first of all, I say congratulations! It’s such an exciting, celebratory, and equally terrifying time. Good luck with commencing the year, and even more good wishes for the next steps you’ll take after accepting your diploma.

As part of the theme of this week’s blog post, I like to talk about a young woman named Marina Keegan. If you haven’t heard of her, she graduated from Yale in 2012, where she was a prolific writer and student leader. She was also her class’ valedictorian and wrote an incredibly moving commencement speech called “The Opposite of Loneliness”. Just days after her graduation, she was killed in a car accident. She was 22.

In her address to her classmates, Marina summarized her time as a student like this:

We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I could say that’s what I want in life. What I’m grateful and thankful to have found at Yale, and what I’m scared of losing when we wake up tomorrow and leave this place.

            …

But let us get one thing straight: the best years of our lives are not behind us. They’re part of us and they are set for repetition as we grow up and move to New York and away from New York and wish we did or didn’t live in New York. I plan on having parties when I’m 30. I plan on having fun when I’m old. Any notion of THE BEST years comes from clichéd “should haves…” “if I’d…” “wish I’d…”

…

We’re so young. We’re so young. We’re twenty-two years old. We have so much time. There’s this sentiment I sometimes sense, creeping in our collective conscious as we lay alone after a party, or pack up our books when we give in and go out – that it is somehow too late. That others are somehow ahead. More accomplished, more specialized. More on the path to somehow saving the world, somehow creating or inventing or improving. That it’s too late now to BEGIN a beginning and we must settle for continuance, for commencement.

…

What we have to remember is that we can still do anything. We can change our minds. We can start over. Get a post-bac or try writing for the first time. The notion that it’s too late to do anything is comical. It’s hilarious. We’re graduating college. We’re so young. We can’t, we MUST not lose this sense of possibility because in the end, it’s all we have.

You can read Marina’s full commencement address here:

http://yaledailynews.com/crosscampus/2012/05/27/keegan-the-opposite-of-loneliness/

If you’re interested in reading more of Marina’s work, you can read her collection of essays and stories published this past April, also entitled ‘The Opposite of Loneliness”.