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By Jared Thomas
I have never been at goodbyes, so I don’t intend to start saying them here. That comes next semester, so everyone continues to insist to me. The end, they say, is closing in. The barbarians are at the gate and they’re carrying pounds and pounds of LSAT prep books instead of clubs. They’re demanding sky-high application fees instead of gold, frankincense, and mer. They’re wreaking havoc on my shaky mental health, instead of my pristine city streets. The end truly is nigh and, for the first time in my life, it feels like it. This is new for me, in a whole host of complicated and a wider collection of painful ways. The fact of the matter is, to me, the end of my high school career was more like ‘Empire Strikes Back’ than ‘Return of the Jedi’ but this….This is ‘Rise of Skywalker’ and the end credits are in real danger of rolling before I’ve had a chance to wrap everything up in a way that’s going to keep the fans happy.
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away… I came to UofL with a lot of goals in mind and a lot of things I wanted to accomplish but didn’t know-how. Over the last four years, I’ve managed some of them, absolutely botched others, ruined things beyond measure and, now and then, worked a miracle or four and pulled out a real win here and there. This, I’ve learned, is just sort of how life works. Sometimes we win, sometimes we lose, sometimes we bite off a little more than we can chew. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my time in this city, it’s that I am not anywhere close to the scholastic dynamo I thought I was. I am not a genius. I am not a superstar. I am just me, a person, a kid. In a lot of really meaningful ways, my time in college hasn’t been about reaching the stars-It’s been about finding the sky at all.
Truth be told, I’m more than a little suspicious of anyone that says they came to college with their whole world planned out at their feet. Sure, I mean, we all have lower-case 'p' plans, but anyone with a capital 'P' plan is deluding themselves and deluding every one around them. In the four years in between over-wrought dramatic “hat-throwings”, a lot changes in a lot of really impactful ways. Your feet get bigger. Your eyes get heavier. The world gets wider. You know how it is. Learning to adjust to the fact that not having it all figured out wasn’t just OK, but was almost encouraged, was not only alarming but mortifying. I was an all-star AP student who never slept, much less dreamed. I spoke in scantron. I wrote using four, five letters at the max. My world was defined at the edges of a blue book. Chaos wasn’t in my vocabulary.
If you know me at all, you know how different things are for me now. Being impulsive is almost my entire personality if we’re being honest. I’m a risk-taker. An adventurer. A big-hearted fool. If you had told me on the eve of my high school graduation that I was entering the next phase of my life with a billion options and a trillion ways to make them happen, he’d have had a heart attack or seven. For me, though, losing the structure that came with the rigidity of my teenage years, learning to bend instead of break, was the most valuable part of my college experience. These days, I’m more Lonely Hearts Club Band than Sgt. Pepper, if you get what I’m saying.
But, at the end of all things, where does that leave me? Where does that leave you? Hell, where does it leave us? I don’t know. I don’t have the answers. Why are you asking me, I ask myself as I write these played out rhetorical questions. The truth, on the New Years' Eve of the real world, I’m scared. Anybody would be. Sixty, seventy years from now, I’ll be dead, god-willing…and how I choose to fill those hours is almost entirely up to me, not anyone else. The idea that anyone could have the hubris to make a bet that they’d want to fill the next eight decades at sixteen the same way they’d want to fill the next seven at twenty-two is beyond just crazy-It’s dangerous. When I was sixteen, I could barely tie my shoes, much lose just what some ambiguous future version of myself would be getting up to until the day he died. Time doesn’t work like that. Humans don’t work like that and neither should you.
I guess my point is that, if you’re feeling the pressure to have it all figured out, to have dotted all your Ts and crossed all your Is, don’t, please, for my sake, but, more importantly, for yours’. For me, the most beautiful moments I’ve ever experienced have happened when I’m have had almost no plans at all. Finding myself lost in the streets of Paris. Waltzing with a gorgeous girl on the edge of Navy Pier in the wintertime. Life, I think, isn’t inherently beautiful. It can be this ugly, vicious thing that kicks you when you’re down and doesn’t let you get back up unless you really, honest to god fight for it. No, life only gets beautiful when you stop looking at it like it's trying to kill you. Life gets beautiful when you embrace the fact that every real decision you make is just a collection of probabilities and each choice should serve only to maximize the good and minimize the bad.
So, as I close in on the end, on my end, I try to tell myself that every day. There are so many things I want to do with my life that trying to list them here would be both a waste of your time and a waste of mine. The fun part is, I do, genuinely, intend to do as many of them as I possibly can. I have a ton of little 'p' plans, but the big 'p' plan? No way, no how. Life is short and life is long, very much in that order and my biggest advice to anyone would be to find ways to enjoy it while your joints are working and your legs can still do stairs. The sad part of all of this, though, is that, in the end, nothing ever really ends. The show goes on and it goes somewhere. If you’re looking for some grand cinematic end to it all, I hate to disappoint you, but there isn’t one. There is always more show.
I think that’s the best part.
Jared Thomas is a McConnell Scholar in the Class of 2020. He is studying political science, economics, and French at the University of Louisville.