You have less than three weeks as an undergraduate. What are you going to do?
So says the (theoretical) William Shatner-sounding voice in my head.
This voice is not, like every other voice in the world, asking about my post-graduation plan (which, after four years of searching, has finally come to “find happiness” — you can imagine the eye rolls I get when I give that answer to family members). This voice is asking about my bucket list; it is inquiring about how I plan to spend the remainder of my time as an undergraduate.
Will I make sure to go Downtown as frequently as humanly possible? Will I spend meaningful nights engaging in long conversations with the people who matter? Will I attempt to eat at Texas Roadhouse as many times as possible? Will I make a mad dash to get to know people who, rumor has it, like to give away large sums of money to random acquaintances from college? (Do people like that exist? Let me know if they do. I’ll keep you updated if I discover any of that rare philanthropic breed.)
Will I go all out with the Confessional (yes, capitalized) and take every opportunity I can to let people know what I’m really thinking? Will I take a stroll down memory lane and reacquaint myself with the blue stuff?
While the answer to the last question is pretty much a definitive no, and while I would rather leave my level of classiness a mystery to the public, I can’t quite say how I intend to spend my final moments of college. I could, in addition to that litany of questions, make a laundry list of all of the things I wish I did in Binghamton, but what would be the point of that?
Anything I didn’t do, I probably didn’t do for a good reason: my sanity, my safety, my reputation, my health, etc. And anything I did, whether for a good reason or not, I certainly learned from the experience. Hence why my answer to the blue stuff is “no.”
The only thing I can say that I will do for the next few weeks, and all I can suggest to my fellow graduating classmates, is to live in the moment.
Eeek, that sounds trite and clichéd, does it not? But here’s the situation: Many of us, myself included, have spent much of our college careers planning ahead, and rightfully so — we wanted jobs, wanted to make sure we handed in assignments, wanted to make sure our outfits for that party were going to be hot-hot-hot, wanted to plot a text so that the weekend would go according to plans.
However, as a result, many of us lost track of what was actually going on: enjoyable times with friends, things we were learning, or even the odd, sunshiny day in Binghamton. Part of my brain is tempted to jump to graduation and my life afterwards, but so much of my year has been that. Why not just simply enjoy this now? I can only say, “well, I’m in college,” for so much longer, that I may as well enjoy that.
We can’t plan a bucket list of what we’re going to do because then we may miss what’s actually going on. Sure, we’ve got to make sure we get things done, or lo and behold graduation may not come as we expected it to for all of these years.
And there’s nothing wrong with saying what we would like to do.
But I’m vowing to try — key word is “try” because I’m still human — to stay as present as humanly possible for the next few weeks, and I encourage others to join me in that semi-Zen-like venture. Challenging? Sure. But you’ve got to give that Shatner-like voice an answer when he asks you a question. I mean, come on, it’s Shatner.