Time Flies

 

Yesterday was my last day of law school classes, which means it was quite probably my last day of school ever. After three long years of classes and internships, exams and papers, interviews and awkward apartment parties, graduation is almost here. It hasn’t quite sunk in yet. It doesn’t seem real that less than a month from now, I will be officially out of academia and preparing for the bar exam (that is the real end of all this!) 13 years of primary and secondary school, 3 years of college, 3 years of law school – if you count preschool, it’s actually more than two decades, which is practically my whole life to this point!

 

 

It’s unbelievable how fast time flies. And it seems like it’s gone by even faster, because my perspective on time is a little twisted around. When I first went to Oxford, it felt like I was going to college, and going on an adventure in another country, but in the end I grew to have another world entirely. Get on the plane in New York, and leave my ‘real’ life behind. Get off the plane in London and arrive in Oxford soon after, and enter my ‘Oxford’ world, where what was going on in the US seemed very far away, not just physically but mentally. And vice versa. The result of this was that, after my last trip home to the US, Oxford not only felt far away in the aftermath, but began very quickly to seem almost like a dream. We always look back with rose-colored glasses at the past, I think, but in this case, it wasn’t that I didn’t remember the rougher patches – it was that the glorious moments eclipsed them. The tricky part for me is keeping the memories sharp and in focus, when they all seem to take on the hazy quality of a dream.

 

 

 

In a way, it feels like Oxford was part of another existence. So the last thing in my ‘real’ life that happened before law school was high school. Which seems like it was a million years ago, and also like it was yesterday, so how can time have flown so quickly? I don’t have a clue. What I do know is that this time around, the end of school feels a lot less like an end, and more like a beginning, which is how they’ve all felt – and maybe that’s the reason they don’t seem as eventful or grand as ‘graduations’ are supposed to. When I graduated high school, I was so excited to take on the challenge of Oxford and everything it stood for. I was determined to start fresh as a new, better version of myself. Of course, wherever you go, there you are, and that’s a lesson I learned the hard way. It also made the end of Oxford feel a little less final. I grew and changed so much while I was there, discovering and acknowledging parts of who I am at heart. And I carried that with me when I left. The end of Oxford didn’t come in a burst of glory. Rather, it felt like a fading of one phase of my life into the next, the edges growing a little rosier and blurrier as I sped away, back toward home in New York and law school.

 

 

Now, I’m approaching a different sort of ending and beginning. I’m staying put in the same place, and much of my life outside of school will continue as before. I’ll be working, of course, but I’ll be volunteering with the Junior League, running with NP friends, baking my gluten-free treats, and carrying on with things in general. It’s not so much a physical difference as it is a mental one, and I think the real changes have already been made. Over the past three years, I’ve learned a lot more about who I am and what I want out of life, both for myself and for what I hope to give back to the world. Oxford was where I grew from a child to a young adult, but law school has been the time when I began to figure out how I hope my adult life will take shape. Nobody can really plan that, of course; after all, life is what happens while we’re making other plans. What I can do for now is look back fondly on the good parts of life so far and let the messy ones fade away, blurring around the edges too. Life is a long and winding road, and not knowing what’s around the corner is what makes it exciting. I look forward to the future with hope, whatever it may bring.

 

 

 

 

This is my Thinking Out Loud Thursday. What’s on your mind today?

 

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