Backwards and Forwards

or
Your College Education Is a Flotation Device
or
Mi Ritrovai

Commencement. The ceremony that pulls you backwards (all those medieval robes, the old marches played as everyone processes and recesses, the story-telling in conversation and by speakers about life in the last four years) and the ceremony that launches you forwards (all the advice about how to handle what comes next, the questions about what comes next, the weird feeling that whatever comes next is like a suit that you haven't grown into yet).

Graduation is a great day, but it is a confusing day for many because it is a ceremony that pulls us in two directions. I think it's supposed to.

I remember my own graduation very clearly. Afterwards is a blur of goodbyes and packing and heading to the beach with friends, but I remember everything leading up to it with the clarity of a pirate captive walking the plank. Don't misunderstand, I was thrilled to be graduating, I just wasn't done being in college. I wasn't ready to leave.

That's me in the middle, happy... and terrified. 

My unreadiness for life after college was the direct cause of everything that came crashing down in the months after graduation. I went to my graduation elated to have accomplished a degree, but with the feeling that we were partying at the edge of a precipice and I was going to fall off any second. And fall off I did. I had a summer job but nothing after. My grad school plans fell through and jobs were nowhere to be found (1). I waited tables while I figured out what to do, in what would turn out to be a time in my life I remember with passionate gratitude for the space it gave me to learn how to grow up, to manage money, to try multiple paths until I found the right one for me. It was the early- to mid-90's. If I could distill those years into a single image it would be of me eating my shift meal and drinking a Red Stripe in the afternoon light coming through the bar windows, filling out my deposit slip for my tips, with Pearl Jam coming over the speakers. Here is another: in jeans, boots, and a flannel shirt over a v-neck undershirt, at the Caribbean Cafe working my way through an imported beer list (2), learning to play darts and listening to STP "Plush."(3) Not the typical image associated with completion of a college degree. I was most parents' nightmare: a college graduate waiting tables and living in a rat-hole apartment. I think I gave my parents several ulcers in those years. I nearly gave myself one. It wasn't stress-free. I developed TMJ. It is hard living close to the bone. It was the best life lesson I could have ever gotten. I often felt, in those years, that I had somehow wasted my college degree, or even that it was a waste. I was floating.

But I was floating deliberately, and I was using my education in ways that I couldn't perceive at the time because once you know things and develop skills they feel natural to you and you can forget that you had to learn them. There is a difference between just floating because you don't care about having an anchor, and giving yourself permission to float because it gives you a decent view and you're still choosing your horizon. A book by clinical psychologist Meg Jay, The Defining Decade, seeks to understand the function of the 20's in an era in which that decade is now held up to young people as years in which they are nearly expected to float around. I think everyone in the whole entire world should read this book, even if your defining decade was decades ago. Jay doesn't have a problem with people figuring out what to do with their lives in their early twenties; she's concerned when they're still in their late twenties and they haven't made any meaningful moves towards a life that can make sense in their late thirties. The floating is supposed to lead somewhere. And what you learned in college is helping you. I promise it is. When you're doing work you never thought you'd do, wandering in ways that seem to have nothing to do with your college degree, you will be very tempted to think that you could be floating in the same way without that degree. But what you learned in those years is with you, is in you, giving you the resources to float high enough to make good decisions about how to spend your life and whom to spend it with.

I didn't feel sure about my direction at age 21, so I gave myself time to figure it out. I went backwards, to Boone, the place where I had gotten that college degree that didn't seem to be getting me anywhere. The place where I last remembered being happy. While I waited tables there, I tried other side jobs, I even took a real estate class, I studied graduate school options, and I took a good, hard look around to see what I wanted. It wasn't until I was talking with a coworker about a poem he was reading for his English class that I realized what I wanted to do. I realized that I could make a living explaining poetry to people (4). So I started making moves towards being an English professor and a few months later I was sitting in Literary Criticism and Bibliography and wondering what I'd write my master's thesis on. I was back in school, going forwards. If I hadn't given myself permission to wander, I couldn't have wandered into this profession that I love so much.

To go through life from moment to moment with  perfect direction and planning is probably the tidiest, most efficient way. Those who do will not waste anything or get lost, ever. And that is fine for them. It probably doesn't have any fear in it, or messiness. But it is not for me, in the same way that a tour in which a guide carefully shepherds the tourists from site to site is not for me. I couldn't do it if I tried. I'd see some interesting view I wanted to get closer to and I'd wander off and get lost and miss the bus and have to find my way back to the hotel by myself.  Sometimes we have to backtrack to understand where we are. Sometimes we have to launch forward into things we don't understand yet with the faith that we can handle them. Sometimes we have to get lost to find our path.

A college degree, even one that isn't in the field you end up in (5), prepares you for a life of uncertainty. And life is uncertain. Tour buses break down, and you may find yourself walking back to your hotel anyway. You might find yourself floating at any time, suddenly and even horrifically detached from the tethers that you thought you could count on like you count on the sun coming up in the morning. You can deal with it, because you have resources. Dante opens The Divine Comedy with a stanza that translates to:  "In the middle of the journey of my life, I found myself to be in a dark wood, for the straight path was lost." The original Italian, mi ritrovai, is an interesting choice because Dante deliberately uses words that mean to discover oneself and also find oneself at the opening of a long story about having to go literally through hell before being able to find one's way back home.

Dante is lost and scared, but it's going to be okay because Virgil is going to show up in a minute to help guide him.
(Symbolic??? I think so. Your education will show up to guide you, too).
image by Gustav Dore, nicked from nybooks.com

I could make sense of the backwardness and forwardness in my own life because I had Dante in my heart, because my college education put it there. I also had Shakespeare and Tennyson and history and philosophy and, yes, some math, and biology and lots and lots of theatre (6). I even had some recreational dance, a class that took care of a phys ed requirement, and it's a good thing, too, because it turns out you never know when you may need to foxtrot.

I had the tools to make floating meaningful and useful. I could rise up and see the many paths, the opportunities, the horizons available to me, and  make sense of them for myself. I had the ability to grab the thing I wanted and make a life of it.

So don't be afraid of going backwards, because it might be your way home. Don't be afraid to float, because you can float meaningfully and come down when you're ready.






(1) It was 1993. My coworkers at the first restaurant where I worked included people with graduate degrees from Ivy League schools. It was a brutal time.
(2) That imported beer list took me two years, and in the process I learned to be a beer snob. See? Everything in life teaches you something. I also still have the mug I earned.
(3) "Plush" still puts me immediately into a zen mode.
(4) The poem was Tennyson's "The Lady of Shalott" and that moment was so earth-shaking for me that I could still, 18 years later, reconstruct it in its entirety in perfect detail, down to what time of day it was and where we were standing and what we were wearing.
(5) i.e. Theatre, in my case.
(6) Forthcoming, on this blog, a study of how my theatre training made me a stronger and better person.