The Best Years

Is it really true that college was the best years of our lives?

Don’t we owe it to ourselves to make the best years of our lives the ones where we know who we are and what we are about? Why should we so privilege the time when we had no fucking clue what we were or what we should have been?

It’s all that firstness, isn’t it? First times really alone; first times defining yourself to strangers outside the context of being someone’s kid; first times getting to decide how hard to work, how much to do, how to set up your life and your affairs; first time to set a direction and follow it wherever it leads.

What happened, the first time you got on a bike? Yeah, me too. First time you picked up an instrument or made breakfast? I think you see where this is going.

Point is, you are better now than you were before, now that you know you are not a vegetarian or that you can still be yourself even after you’ve stopped being pre-med.

There is something freeing, knowing that your choices are behind you and in some sense insignificant anyway. You need never again agonize over what it might mean, in an existential sense, to change your major again. Out here, much older, and whatever the equivalent of changing your major is, it doesn’t involve a trip to the registrar’s office or figuring out all the prereqs. Out here it is much more fluid, much scarier, and I wonder whether we are really preparing people for anything when we put them in highly structured institutions for the first third of their lives.

gauche
19 Mar 10