the end
It's over dude, it's over.
I am amazed how suddenly the end of my law school career has crept up on me. It was only a year ago that I was a 1L (actually, it's been two); at the very least, it's only been a blink of an eye since last summer (actually, it's been nine months.) The memories still are fresh, and it's been all too easy to convince myself that time hasn't passed, that I can stay in the same frame of mind and in this frame, the world will remain in geosynchronous orbit.
But if there is a fundamental rule of life, it's that nothing stands still. The only thing you have control over is how you choose to remember as it passes you by. Even then, you will never get to re-experience things as they really were. The tyranny of memory imposes its own version of the story on the events. Perhaps it's something unavoidable, something our minds have to do in order to spin a coherent narrative out of an incoherent world. In any case, it sucks.
I graduate in just over three weeks. I take the California Bar in just over three months. I leave Stanford after that. There is no way to pretend that there is plenty of time left for my current way of life. Change is coming, and in large quantities.
Then again, what am I afraid of? I thought I accepted long ago that it's not the destination in life that truly matters, it's the ride. (It would be nice to be remembered some day, of course, as a good person who did worthwhile things.) I have already vowed to live every day as if it were my last, and to accept things as they are, and enjoy moments when I am in the middle of them. I no longer feel the need to write extensive journal entries documenting what I had for lunch every day (although it's interesting to go back and read them), and I no longer feel the urge to constantly take pictures when I am with friends. Those were my ways of trying to freeze time in place. At least this is what I have told myself.
In the meantime, I am just going to try and cram as much enjoyment of life as I can into the next 4 months... finals and the bar be damned. Because from what I hear, once you start working..
then it's really over.