Hello Senior Year!

ruminations from my new season ritual

Before the start of each semester, I like to go to the beach and watch the sunrise. I feel such a deep sense of peace watching the roaring waves and the sun beginning to peak its head out of the sky. In addition to my journal, blanket and a sore head from a fresh set of back to school braids, another key element to this ritual is listening to the song, “I hope you dance” by Lee Ann Womack. There’s a lyric in this song that goes, “I hope you still feel small when you stand beside the ocean.” There is so much power in experiencing that feeling as I look into the never ending horizon. In watching the sun rise, the waves crash and the birds hover above the water in search of fish, I feel so comfortable in my insignificance. Whatever fears and anxieties that I feel about this new season momentarily wash away and I am reminded that life will happen as it is meant to. It always does.

Though I am beginning my senior year of college soon, I can still remember the rush of emotions I felt the day that I moved in my freshman year. Whenever I look back on those photos, videos, and journal entries, I can’t help but say, “wow, I can’t believe that I used to be so young.” The day before, I had also watched the sunrise and set forward positive affirmations for what I hoped the semester would engender. Per usual, expectations and reality so infrequently resembled one another. So much life has happened since then. Yet in many ways, my life still has far more questions than answers.

I enter this academic year with more certainty than I have had in the past. Semesters spent obsessing over the opinions of others, pushing myself beyond my capacity and shying away from experiences outside of my comfort zone have taught me what really matters. I don’t want to be in the library on a Friday night. I want to be out making memories with the people that I love who will rarely all be in the same place again. I don’t want to stress myself out getting involved in extracurriculars that don’t interest me in order to be a “competitive law school applicant.” I don’t want to live for a person who doesn’t exist yet. I want to live for myself and listen to my needs. I want to laugh more, be spontaneous, chase adventure and make "safe mistakes."

Undoubtedly, my senior year will be stressful. It will be intense and exhausting. It will be scary. Even amidst all of the senior year terror, my two theses and stressful fellowship applications, I want to trust in myself and the strength that my experiences, good and bad, have fostered in me throughout college. Whether or not I truly have more of a sense of what I am doing now, I certainly have more faith in the unknown. Life always happens as it should. After all, no one has to tell the sun to rise. I’ll never be able to perfectly predict or methodically plan out my future, no matter how hard I try. So what if instead, I just came along for the ride?