Soon, thousands of graduating seniors will, in a sense, be making their first steps into unfettered adulthood. The university they have attended the past four (or more) years will no longer be the dominating institution in their lives; they will no longer be beholden to parents, professors, or academic advisers.
As graduates leave the familiarity of ASU, they enter into a wild, unknown world.
I will be among the maroon masses of May, the newly minted ASU alum. After the pomp and circumstance fades away, though, the story continues ... the “ever after” becomes the here and now.
Yet, while looking toward the unpredictable future, I find myself reconsidering the past.
Naturally, I compare these last two weeks of college to the last two weeks of my high school experience. While certain similarities exist (chronic laziness, for example) the underlying emotional current is quite different. That sense of foreboding — on the horizon looms the large and unknown — is almost missing entirely. The time-honored phrase uttered by my high school teachers, “you’ll be a small fish in a big pond,” no longer carries the weight it once did.
Instead, impending graduation comes with it an air of serenity.
For our whole lives, we’ve been small fish in a very, very large pond — the only thing that has changed is our perception of that pond. From childhood to high school to college and beyond, the world we inhabit is what it is, and has always been as such. Only as we age do we come to see our rather small place in it.
My high school was a large place when I first came to it, and a small place when I left. ASU was an even larger place my first semester, but at the conclusion of my last, it is now as familiar as a second home.
Ideally, the smallness of our lives falls away in phases, until we are upon the threshold of adulthood. We appreciate — not fear — the world in all its vastness.
I suppose the serenity of these weeks before graduation is the acceptance of my place in this large pond. The future is anything but certain and the present is in transition, but anxiety and fear would be pointless — limiting, even — at a time like this.
Why worry about the future? Find solace that the present exists, in and of itself; from a well-chosen present unfolds a well-chosen future.
Yet this process does not happen without consideration. We are, ultimately, responsible for our future, our lives beyond the realm of college. Graduation shows we have completed one task ... but have many more still to meet, however big, however small.
The key to accomplishing what we wish to in adulthood rests simply on choosing our place in the world, our small corner of the large pond. In these last days of school, remember that we can perceive the big pond as either the dark and trembling unknown ... or the hitherto untamed wilderness of possibility.
Alex is hedging his bets and sending out early resumes, and can be reached at apetruse@asu.edu
