25 years later
It was 25 years ago tonight that I graduated from high school. It was the first time we'd purposely had an indoor graduation; the other three years were supposed to be held outside, though one of them (I think '93) had to be inside because it was raining. (I'd attended the three graduations previous to mine due to being in the graduation band.) I feel like '94 was exceptionally buggy and was not upset to be inside for my own ceremony. My senior year, my school was renovated and we went from having one full-size gym and a smaller, stage-like gym to three total gyms, one next to another, with the ability to adjust the size of the rooms due to movable bleachers. They were able to fit a lot of people into the building. My parents even made my yearbook as they were in the group shot from my graduation. At least the next few graduations were held in the gym--I made it to a couple of them--but at this point the school population has outgrown such a thing and they're now held at a convocation center like at NIU or the Sears Center in Hoffman Estates. Or, in the case of a pandemic, they ended up holding a car parade of sorts from what I understand.
High school graduation holds such promise. You are on the cusp of adulthood and starting your life. You realize you likely will never seen many of these people again. It is exciting and nerve-wracking at the same time, and you wonder if you are making the best choices for your life. You never know until you gain some perspective. For some people, high school is the good ol' days and nothing will ever compare, while others realize that peaking in high school is sad, and hope to peak later. Marriage and children and successful carriers. But not everyone gets that out of life. Not everyone even makes it out of high school. One of our classmates died in a drowning accident on the river the summer after sophomore year. Two more, at least, would not make it to our tenth reunion, ultimately victims of car accidents; one was a close friend of mine who passed before graduating from college. The other walked away from his accident but later died of internal bleeding.
Hindsight makes you want to go back and warn your friends of their poor choices, or to suggest perhaps they go a different route. It also makes you wonder what might have happened had you turned left instead of right on your own path, and where you might be right now had you taken the fork in the road and meandered a bit. Yet you realize you wouldn't be the person you are had your life veered in another direction. Perhaps you would be more successful; perhaps less. Perhaps you would be on a different career path. What if you'd taken X class instead of Y in college? It can take just one person, a professor or fellow classmate, to profoundly influence you. It just takes one meeting to have your perspective on things altered permanently, for better or worse.
I can tell you that I had different expectations for my life at the age of 17, and where I am now is not at all where I expected to be. Some days that's good; some days, I wonder where I went wrong. Or did I? Is this truly the path I was supposed to go on, and I didn't know it until I got there? But where am I going? That's part of my problem, and I suspect it happened to others; we thought we'd be handed a road map to guide us along, and it never arrived. Others were perfectly find drawing their own paths and have had no problems. It's weird to wake up one day and wonder where you are and if you're in the right place, but at some point you need to decide if this is where you want to be, or if you want to go other places. And you hope it doesn't take another 25 years to get there.
High school graduation holds such promise. You are on the cusp of adulthood and starting your life. You realize you likely will never seen many of these people again. It is exciting and nerve-wracking at the same time, and you wonder if you are making the best choices for your life. You never know until you gain some perspective. For some people, high school is the good ol' days and nothing will ever compare, while others realize that peaking in high school is sad, and hope to peak later. Marriage and children and successful carriers. But not everyone gets that out of life. Not everyone even makes it out of high school. One of our classmates died in a drowning accident on the river the summer after sophomore year. Two more, at least, would not make it to our tenth reunion, ultimately victims of car accidents; one was a close friend of mine who passed before graduating from college. The other walked away from his accident but later died of internal bleeding.
Hindsight makes you want to go back and warn your friends of their poor choices, or to suggest perhaps they go a different route. It also makes you wonder what might have happened had you turned left instead of right on your own path, and where you might be right now had you taken the fork in the road and meandered a bit. Yet you realize you wouldn't be the person you are had your life veered in another direction. Perhaps you would be more successful; perhaps less. Perhaps you would be on a different career path. What if you'd taken X class instead of Y in college? It can take just one person, a professor or fellow classmate, to profoundly influence you. It just takes one meeting to have your perspective on things altered permanently, for better or worse.
I can tell you that I had different expectations for my life at the age of 17, and where I am now is not at all where I expected to be. Some days that's good; some days, I wonder where I went wrong. Or did I? Is this truly the path I was supposed to go on, and I didn't know it until I got there? But where am I going? That's part of my problem, and I suspect it happened to others; we thought we'd be handed a road map to guide us along, and it never arrived. Others were perfectly find drawing their own paths and have had no problems. It's weird to wake up one day and wonder where you are and if you're in the right place, but at some point you need to decide if this is where you want to be, or if you want to go other places. And you hope it doesn't take another 25 years to get there.