Everything went well. I drove to SB with my parents, met up with old friends, followed the bagpipers through the formal gardens, listened to speeches and award presentations and the choir, moved the tassel to the left side, made my way across stage, shook hands, smiled for the camera, and it was done. A blurred moment set a sharp boundary between three magical years and all that lies ahead. Leaving college is an awful lot faster than getting there.
How do you go on, when in your heart you begin to understand there is no going back?
For all that, I'm still an undergraduate. I (unofficially) have my BA from Westmont, but have a year and a bit left at UCI. I have classes and finals and homework and labs and research. And I don't have chapel, or the DC, or the prayer chapel, or Stan the Man, or all my friends within a five minutes walk, or vespers, or early morning runs on Butterfly Beach, or PW, or potter's clay.
But- and it's a big but- I do have access to all that filled those things with goodness. If Westmont was a training ground, and was that full of Goodness, how much more joy will there be from here on out? Those kinds of good things--Stan's wisdom, and the prayer in the chapel, and pure joy in worship, and so much more--may not always come so easily. But they are worth fighting for.
And I will fight, through to the end of the race at the Great Commencement.
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