Walk With Me

Some people are lucky enough to know exactly what they want to do after they graduate. And some of us are a bit more perplexed by the process and spend a good deal of time after we earn that special piece of paper trying to determine its meaning and worth or lack thereof to our lives. Some of us have the opportunity to have a tentative plan inside our skulls but when those "subject to change" plans become a seed misplanted what do we do then? The fears that I held prior to graduation gripped me so fully that I could only muster enough strength to pass all of the today classes and drown down the tomorrow that came oh too soon.

While other people talked about graduate school and law school, I quickly shunned those options off. "Man, we been in school forever." Because the last thing I wanted to do was go back to school with another couple years of my life gone and more loans that neither I nor my parents could pay off. I'm not sure who read it, but the "letter to my professor" never fell upon the ears that I really needed it to. My mentor. He knows who he is. Or at least he did. Our graduation meant a different scenario for him and he too had to make a sudden change in his life. And with his absence and no one to yell at me proper and say I'm not trying hard enough I have left my fate to an unpredictable wave of "maybe" and "I hope so." And I know that's not what I want either.

Maybe it's some sort of flaw of the American educational system or some flaw of society but I think there has been something fundamentally important missing from the last 18 years of my schooling. No one here teaches you how to find something you love and turn it into a viable option or skill that can sustain you financially while fulfilling you psychologically and emotionally. The arts are discouraged. The imagination is repressed. Independent thinking is shunned. And feasibility is all that matters in a society that runs solely on oil barrels and currency exchange rates.

What about me as a person? Don't I matter? Don't I count? Don't I have a right to dream? And why is it that these dreams have to stay locked away in a tiny pocket of my psyche and guarded from the rude eyes of the world, even my own family? Why are we forced to learn some sort of skill and learn how to market that instead learning how to hone whatever gift the Almighty has blessed me with into a means to support myself in a way that benefits both the community and my soul along the way? Maybe I've lost many of you, but with the turn of the year I will begin to look back inside of myself and question what the things outside of me mean to my growth not only as a human being, but as a cohesive spirit extending his energy into a world I hope to someday make my mark upon. Follow me.