I have no idea where I will be two years from now.
I have no idea whether I will have finally declared my Economics major, or whether I will be continuing my education or looking for a job. I have no idea whether I will still be sitting with the same people for lunch, whether the friends I have now will be the friends I celebrate graduation with.
I have no idea what it will feel like to be finishing college. The very thought of graduating scares me to death. I can only imagine, no, I cannot even imagine what the current seniors are going through as they stand at the end of their Emory years, less than a month away from commencement and the real world.
I wonder how many of them are thinking about the good times. Some of them might be thinking all the way back to move-in day, remembering that first comically awkward conversation they had with their roommate. Or maybe a few of them are remembering the first time they received a compliment from a professor.
Some may simply be thinking about the first time they sprawled out on McDonough Field, feeling the sun in that special way that it can only be felt in Atlanta.
I wonder how many of them are wishing they had more time. At the very least, most of them probably wish they could spend a few more week with their friends. But how many of them are wishing for more time, period? How many are thinking about the opportunities they missed, about that one time during their sophomore year when they decided not to run for executive board of that one organization they loved.
Maybe some of them are thinking about that Friday night during sophomore year, when all of their friends went out but they decided not to, instead choosing to spend the night sitting at their desk, a calculus textbook open in front of them, thinking more about what their friends were doing than about what the answer to number four on the problem set was.
I wonder how many of them are thinking about the bad times. I wonder how many of them will be sitting in their seats at Commencement, hearts racing from adrenaline, anxious minds buzzing with bittersweet excitement, thinking about that friend they got into a fight with their first year, a fight as unnecessary as it was destructive, a fight that their friendship never really recovered from.
I wonder how many of them are thinking about that midterm junior year, the one that was worth half of their final grade, that they failed and learned the hard way that sometimes its better not to study with friends.
I wonder how many of them are thinking about their first college breakup, cringing at some of the things they said, wincing at some of the things that were said to them.
I wonder how many of them are too scared to think at all. I wonder how many of them have no idea where they will be or what they will be doing three months from now. I wonder how many of them have had to deal with rejection letters over the past several months.
I wonder, if you went around to every senior, and asked them to quantify their rejections and their acceptances, would the acceptances outnumber the rejections?
So much of life is about perspective. The way we choose to perceive events oftentimes matters more than the events themselves. There will be many good times. And there will probably be many bad times.
At the end of the day, it may turn out that the bad times slightly outnumber the good times. So it goes.
We have very little control over most of what happens to us in life. But we do have control over how we perceive what happens to us, over how we react, how we respond, over what we choose to think about and focus on as we move from one phase of life to another.
I wonder how many of the seniors have realized this. I wonder how many of the rest of us will realize it over our remaining years at Emory.
I wonder to what extent I even realize this. I hope that by the time I stand amongst my classmates at Commencement, I have stopped wondering.
Ryan Gorman is a College sophomore from Plano, Texas.
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