“I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package, I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that’s what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.”
Joan Didion, commencement address at the University of California, 1975
Today was the last first day of semester I'm ever going to have. Sure, that's what I thought last year, but I really mean it this time. Last year I wasn't ready. But this year it's different. The end feels right. Thankfully, it's not quite yet. There's books on hong kong to read and a thesis to write, but I can see it somewhere in the future, and it's scary, yes, and stressful, god yes, but it's also, in some manic, frustrating kind of way, exciting. I think that's how the last first day should feel. The feeling that life, such as it is, such as it may ever be, is hovering right around the corner. And the only thing that that lies in between are the last few months of student freedom, of breakfasts at 11 am, ink-stained fingertips and days spent lost in the library.
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