“Pandemic”--Andrew

You were wrong.

You were wrong to sacrifice hours of essential study for the sake of that unnecessary afternoon nap. You were wrong to excuse yourself from your last period because the subject matter of your upcoming test had failed to spark your interest from the very first lesson. You were wrong to assign blame to your math teacher upon your realization that one Thursday night that derivatives were not your forte. They were not the best of times, but perhaps you were wrong when you identified this pattern of behavior as a hatred for your time in school. You know that now.

As the difficulty of your new reality away from social interaction settled in your mind, the daily campus experiences you once held such disdain for became not a greater annoyance but a subject of nostalgia; they were no longer thorns in your side but rather petals on the ground in their place. Your impatience with that group of underclassmen that consistently chose to walk in the middle of the hallway now felt like the silliest, most trivial of worries. You often expressed frustration with the passion your teachers expressed for the linguistic nightmare of Shakespearean English, for you never saw what was so captivating about saying everything with more syllables and combining words that had no business being combined. But as you sat in your room starved of dialogue, those long sentences suddenly struck you as thought-provoking, gorgeously articulate pieces of poetry. The quiet walls of the home you once found comfort in were no longer an escape but a prison, no longer a place of rest but a tunnel to which you could see no exit.

As subjective and difficult to navigate as the topic may be, our current circumstances have instilled in me an urge to provide a general definition of life, and the purpose thereof. Life isn’t defined by the comfort you achieve in the absence of adversity. That is, there is no meaning in pleasure when there is nothing to the contrary. You once valued Saturdays because it meant you had gotten through a week of schoolwork. You once valued your time alone because it was a break from well-intentioned but draining interaction with your peers. But what value is there in solitude when you know no company? It was this question that reminded me of what seems to be our overarching goal as human beings: to chase that which tells us our difficulties were worth our time. Author and motivational speaker Simon Sinek noted that our opportunity amidst these unprecedented circumstances is “what ​will w​ e be, not how are we to preserve what we had.” As the life we once knew becomes foreign to us, we will progress not by looking to adapt the environment to ourselves but by adapting ourselves to the environment. The most immovable, constant obstacle in life is not as much a physical entity as it is a simple understanding that conflict and difficulty are prevalent, evolving forces that follow us wherever we go. In the same way that musical disarray teaches us to value harmony, it is the struggles of life that teach us to 

value comfort. Jim Carrey observed in a 2014 commencement address that we tend to “choose our path out of fear disguised as practicality.” I cannot tell you what your specific, individual purpose on this planet is, but I can say with confidence that you have more to gain from accepting life’s challenges than from avoiding them for fear of inconvenience.

All things considered, it was never that final goodbye you were robbed of that would serve as a testament to the hardships you lived through for the last four years. Life was never a matter of predictable, scheduled recognition in the way your graduation ceremony should have been, for it is a journey that creates itself not on the basis of fairness or deservedness but on the basis of immediate circumstance. As you stand alone in your mirror in the cap and gown you never got to wear, take comfort in knowing that your success lies not in the opportunity to walk across the stage but in knowing that somewhere nearby, regardless of physical separation, the classmates you first walked the campus with are standing with you, fellow protagonists in a story to be told generations from now.

When the news of school closure first hit you, you felt as if you were less than the graduating classes before you. You felt as if you no longer had a defining moment in your high school career. You felt as if after all these years, you suddenly had little to show for it.

You were wrong.

Sources
Sinek, Simon. ​Simon Sinek's 5 Minutes on Why COVID-19 Is An Opportunity​. ​Youtube​, 28 Mar. 2020, www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8lExUWLCyY.
Carrey, Jim. ​Jim Carrey's Commencement Address at the 2014 MUM Graduation​. Youtube,​ 2014, Jim Carrey's Commencement Address at the 2014 MUM Graduation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V80-gPkpH6M