It doesn’t hit you, until suddenly, it does: The tidal wave of panic that washes over you upon realizing that college is just around the corner. Yeah, you’ve been used to the constant bombardment of questions about your future. But has it ever really hit you that the ever so distant future you imagined is actually happening right now? Probably not.
And it won’t hit you, not until you’re waving goodbye to your best friend as she goes from being two minutes down the street to two hours across the state. It’ll hit you when you hear the silence after the loud thunk of you slamming your trunk closed once you finally get that one lumpy box to fit just right. It’ll even hit you all over again that first night when you’re lying in your new bed, looking up at the ceiling thinking, This is it.
Recommended for you
That’s the funny thing about humans; we tend to lose touch with reality just enough so that stressful events don’t really seem like they happen until after they do. It’s just human nature to protect our emotional wellbeing this way. But even if this seems foreign to you, you have done it before. Your 8th grade graduation, the first time you walked into your high school or even when you got your first acceptance letter. These are times that didn’t necessarily seem like they could actually happen, times that seemed so distant that they could never really play out, could they? But then suddenly they do, and then life just keeps on going.
Over and over again we are bombarded by this overwhelming sensation of time. Hours, minutes, seconds, days and years, each of which dictates how we as humans manage our lives, in order to compensate for the continuous change that our world offers. In the words of the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, “Everything changes and nothing stands still.”
Basically, the world continues to spin regardless of personal convictions, and we must too move forward in order to keep up -- which is exactly why it is so imperative to reflect honestly upon the present with positive intent in the future. Yes, there is fear and uncertainty now, but what will be the fruits of these feelings in the future? Even though we all desperately feel nostalgia when hit by great change, we must keep moving forward or we’ll forever be stuck in the rut of the past. So, will you use these emotions that breed from change as a platform to try to cling to the past? Or will you use them as a catalyst for creating new, just as beautiful memories?
And in those terms, personal change can be both monumental and minuscule. Monumental in the fact that, yes, you accept change and use it as a stepping stone a better future. Or minuscule in the idea that you only change a little bit, not really accepting anything, just cleaving to distant memories in new ways. But either way, you’ve known change your whole life.
A morning will always awaken a new day, and a night will always conclude the day’s journey. Hours will continue to tick by as we each grow or change in small and big ways to accommodate our needs. But according to Heraclitus, even if we stay stranded in our inability to embrace change, we are still moving; it’s just the opposite direction of our life’s journey and potential. But that is why, although we are terrified, we must take these first few lonely steps into uncertainty, leaving everything behind in order to keep up with a world that will continue to change regardless of our stagnation.
The world you carefully built up, the reality that you have known, is crumbling down around you, and it is up to you as to how you reconstruct it.
But, no world exists without balance. To be able to move forward, we have to let go of the past. Letting go doesn’t mean abandoning old convictions; it just means accepting them as memories that we can use as a foundation for our new world. Just like in Pixar’s "Inside Out," sadness at the loss of something can taint the happiness of our memories, but we can’t move on to create more happiness until we accept that sadness. So, it’s OK to be sad. But rather than wallowing in the loneliness and fear of our new life, we need to accept them as emotions needed to prompt us to go out and create more memories in our new home.
We must let go of the fear and pain and allow ourselves to be open to letting in the many new emotions, people, and memories that change can bring. And, suddenly, before we know it we will have taken so many steps forward that when we look back, our memories of this time won’t be filled with that ever present fear, but rather joy at this new home we’ve created for ourselves.
