[T]rust me, in 20 years, you’ll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can’t grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked…
The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind, the kind that blindside you at 4 p.m. on some idle Tuesday…
Sometimes you’re ahead, sometimes you’re behind. The race is long, and in the end, it’s only with yourself…
Whatever you do, don’t congratulate yourself too much, or berate yourself either. Your choices are half chance. So are everybody else’s…
Understand that friends come and go, but with a precious few you should hold on. Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle, because the older you get, the more you need the people who knew you when you were young…
Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it’s worth…
When Mary Schmich’s column in the Chicago Tribune was published in June of 1997, I didn’t see it. In fact, I first ran across it when Baz Luhrmann remixed the Romeo + Juliet version of “Everybody’s Free” with the whole column spoken over it, and Lou Brutus played it one morning on HFS in the spring of 1999.
It was too late, of course. Those were things I needed to hear then, and still need to remind myself now – but when I really needed to hear them was in 1990, and again in 1997. In one case I was headed into higher education, and in the other I was being cast out of it. When I first walked the aisle in a mortarboard and gown, it was secure in the knowledge that I was headed to bigger and better things; when I left my old apartment for the last time – fourteen years ago this week – it was staring into an abyss: 25 years old, academic career prematurely terminated, six thousand bucks in credit card debt and no prospects for employment beyond “office temp”.
It staggers me to think that I’ve now been out of higher ed twice as long as I was in it – hell, that I’ve been out of it longer than I was preparing for it. You’d think that pushing 40 (or reeeeeally dragging 30) would mean that your college years were no longer definitional, but in some ways I’m still living in the shadow of decisions that were made in 1989, for better or worse. In one way, fourteen years doesn’t seem like nearly enough for how long it’s been – but at the same time, when the light’s right and the wrong song comes on the iPhone, I tend to forget I’m not twenty-something years old.
The point of all this is that graduation is completely the 180-degree-opposite time to be offering advice for the future. College is the real world, even if it’s not the whole world – and it’s a warning you need well before you arrive, not an admonition once you’re departing.