Ein Schritt

I have been thinking a lot lately about graduation. I have made the hard decision to let that be an ends in itself. The tough thing about this is that I don't hold any of its value as intrinsic. There's nothing about the nature of putting in the endless hours of tedium in order for the University to give me a gilt sheet of paper that says I'm a Bachelor of Arts. What does that even mean?

Without going into the ridiculous blind worshiping of college degrees that is clear in our culture, I want to go into my decision-making process. This is more for my benefit than anyone else's, but here is my reason: It's hard.

I had never struggled until school until college, being blessed with a healthy intellect, a knack for befriending teachers and parents who were immeasurably helpful with schoolwork. But in college I encountered a problem I didn't expect would be my downfall. Life unfolded itself before my eyes, and I saw paths besides the ones that funneled through a college degree. Like an electron seeking the path of least resistance, I found that not only were there ways around the load that was school's tepid busywork, but that, in my unambitious 360° view of what I expected from life, it was literally the only one there.

I shirked for a year, took off school wanting to prove that I could make a life without the cushion a Bachelor's Degree offered. But after a while of trying to swim upstream, I realized I was swimming in a lake. I expected the adults in my life, having grown up in a generation that viewed school as a necessity, to capitulate to my second-rate choice with forgiveness in their eyes assuring me that I had had good intentions. This was not at all my experience. They ensured me that they felt the same way, and were proud that I was standing firm in my beliefs. Not a soul uttered a contrary word. So it was that I again found myself on a plane extending in every direction, the only obstacle in view my degree.

I first wandered back to the University literally because it was the only significant direction. I didn't care about grades. I could play intramural soccer and live the life of a student with all the subsidies and none of the ambition. I lived here for another three semesters, trying to find a major that would spark some sort of desire to create, to find a field I could become an expert in and not resent. There were definitely bright spots, but nothing that really took, and I drove myself to the point where I wanted to drop out again in December, never really having hoped to complete school.

Here, I was given a providential shove I didn't want, and certainly didn't deserve: I passed a class I should and thought I would have failed. It was from then to now that I realized that I had missed the purpose of the one blip on my radar. I thought it was insignificant. I grew surer by the semester that the academic accomplishment I would achieve from overcoming it would offer me no lasting satisfaction or skill. Honestly, to this day, I doubt that it will. What came to me since the New Year is that the challenge was far more than scholastic. Since my graduation in 2006, I have heaped all my apathy and disdain upon the education system and its flaws. Now I see that that pile, the only blemish on my otherwise spotless plane of potential, itself is the very challenge that my perfectionism in decision-making can latch onto. This has more benefits than just the personal accomplishment or even the ability to look past frivolity in tasks I will need to do to provide for myself; I now discover its relevance in an array of relationships in which performing annoying tasks show patience and care, and supply its very building blocks. Surmounting my own loathing to do a task I find needless at best, suddenly offers a meaningful destination and a transferable skill.

In actually living this out, I have compiled a semester of classes that will be very trying on me. After this battery, however, I will have a semester of reprieve before I will have the required amount of hours to graduate. To that end I have both a plan and a wish. Now I can begin to climb the berg, made greater for the emotional weight, greater still for the years I built habits upon laziness and whimsy. I plod on knowing that I'm single-handedly responsible for my own annoyance, but believing in the joy I will find on the other side of the mountain.