"The meeting of two eternities, the past and the future....is precisely the present moment."
-Henry David Thoreau
The beginning of my last week of high school is one day away. It will be a week to remember, full of faces I'll never see again. It is difficult for me to wrap my head around. A great majority of people that I've seen daily for so long will vanish, become hazy, shifting illusions in my memory; somehow leaving a dull warm glow inside me. Time heals all, but somehow the flow of time itself can be challenging. My grappling with my experiences throughout high school parallels a sport I used to know and do: running.
At the beginning of a race, you're incredibly nervous. Looking around, you can see others preparing for the ordeal ahead just like you, but you do not care. You retreat deep inside your mind, thinking only of the what the future holds. Often, you cannot bring yourself to imagine life past the end of the race; there is after all, a lot of immediate stress on your mind. The future is closer every second, and it's not the future you asked for, but boy is it coming fast. A sweating man in a blinding white shirt lifts the starting gun, exhales, and fires.
It is only you now. Far off in the darkest recesses of your mind you can hear voices cheering, echoing up like from an ocean floor, but they are so far off it hardly matters. All you know is that you're treading water, and that you're losing the fight. Every once in a while, you might even look around you, look at the exertion on the other's faces; They're not strangers after all. They're just like you. They may have a different set of experiences, have different beliefs, but right here, in this moment, you know them as you know yourself. The pain washes over, and you're treading water once again. All that matters is the finish line. You think only of the finish line.
Suddenly, the ending clock moves into your field of view. You feel a deep respect for the runners beside you, they've worked off of you since the very beginning, and you've pushed off of them. They've made you a better person. The race is about to end; who will you push and be pushed by then? In fact, the very essence of your present experience is about to shift. You are nascent. Then, the race is over, but the clock is still running.
I'm running every part of the race at the same time. I am nervous about the new marathon I'm entering, still working to finish the race, and mindful of the classmates that have helped push me throughout these four years. This past week, I gave my WISE Presentation, and while I was incredibly nervous from the beginning of the WISE semester about the presentation, and I fumbled with my words a bit, I also had a lot of fun sharing my third space experience. While preparing, I struggled with delineating what I actually wanted to say. My goals and my third space being intertwined, but not necessarily the same, I had to tie everything together and explain to the evaluators why I was talking about a given subject. Making the ordeal even messier was the reality that most of my growth throughout the semester did not even occur at my third space, but was rather stimulated by my third space and experienced elsewhere. My evaluators stuck with me throughout the entirety of my time talking, which was a miracle considering that just two days before, I had tried out my presentation on my mother. The presentation ended up running around 50 minutes. If I could describe the effect of my presentation on her, I would say that she looked like she was suffering from a heart attack, but that the heart attack was too boring to pay attention to.
Somehow, the presentation came together in around two days, and after a good amount of time paraphrasing what I was going to say for each slide, I felt somewhat ready. I had one doubt in my mind, and that was whether to include at the end of the presentation a small last minute reflection I had written. It follows:
"WISE has really done its job for me, meaning that along with bringing major breakthroughs for me about who I am and what I love to do, some related questions have also come up, and I’ve been pondering them quite a bit.
My first question is career related. I’ve found that I’m a generally scattered person, meaning that my brain can be in many different places at once, and that my thought process doesn’t have the sort of continuity that one might expect. Programming is a very logical pursuit. A leads to B which leads to C. This being considered, should I really be programming? Are there other areas that may work better for me. I feel that my personality and the way my brain functions may actually be more conducive to the humanities. All this taken into account, I still would love to pursue STEM, but have unresolved doubts.
Along this same course of questioning, are there certain interests and areas of expertise that are very conducive to my thought process? What fields are they in and how might I gain exposure.
My final career question is this: What do I really want fifteen years down the road? What will make me happiest? I have some very diverging ideas…..
At WISE, my feelings about a general lack of contact with other people at my third space and my large amount of contact during OPI led me to the realization that I might be a borderline extrovert. I’m not a very good extrovert, as I’m quite shy around new people. How can I get through this?
Finally, and this is the one that has reverbated with me most deeply, what do I have to prove, if anything? Everybody wears a certain mask in terms of how they want to be perceived, and my first three years and a quarter of my time at Miramonte were characterized by one overarching goal: Above all, I wanted respect. I wanted to be taken seriously. Perhaps this comes from my childhood. I certainly was not taken to be the serious member of the family, in fact as the youngest child, I often said the outrageous, absurd, funny things. Afterwards, my family would laugh and call me “cute” or “adorable”.
My family has always been loving towards one another, but we’ve also always been competitive, so I always want to win in any sort of competition. Perhaps out of this competitive drive came an ill-fated conclusion: If I was the funny one, the light-hearted one, I wouldn’t be taken seriously. I wanted to succeed. I didn’t want to be “cute” or “adorable”, I wanted to win. I wanted to win.
So there I was, a light-hearted kid masquerading as someone serious, hoping to gain some respect. As the years drew on, I took my mask off less and less. Eventually, I stopped taking it off altogether. I was serious, always. Enter Miramonte High School. I’m a straight-edge individual looking for some respect. At Miramonte’s environment of academic competition, I have a field day. In this classroom, two years ago, I had a field day; every day. In a sense, AP European History was the perfect environment for me to hone my serious and competitive urges. Frequent tests, combined with a literal leaderboard. More opportunities for respect could not be found anywhere else. So, I did it. I gained respect. I encountered my greatest successes in this class. I also encountered my greatest single failure: After years of gradually forgetting, I completely forgot who was underneath the mask. I became someone I was never meant to be. Here and there, there were traces of the past: I would frequently wear goofy hawaiian shirts, almost out of some subconscious drive. I thought they made me “chill”. I think I was trying to remember who I actually was. Like I said, OPI was a turning point for me. That’s because out of some miracle, I remembered who I was in the first place. I remember the entire way back into San Francisco on the plane, I just sat there with this grin on my face. Suffice to say that second semester has been an interesting experience. I’ve been reconciling my serious side with my older more lighthearted nature. To a certain extent, I think that I can’t really shake some of my seriousness. It’s a part of me now. However, I also think I’ve regained a lot more of my old silliness. In a sense, it is fitting that I give this presentation in this room right now. I think I’ve come full circle, from forgetting myself to remembering again. So that leaves us with one final question: Do I still have something to prove/respect to gain, or should I drop that part of myself altogether?”
Mr. Poling and Mr. Clauson told me they had one essential guideline to follow when giving a presentation: "Speak the truth, and not just any truth, but yours."
Everything in the presentation I had before the reflection was truthful but at the same time, it wasn't, because it was skewed data. Without the reflection, I wasn't presenting my whole self. Conversely, I wanted to keep my presentation as calm, factual, and tight as possible. I also had some fears about saying my remaining questions, as they were related to my past in the very classroom I was giving the presentation in. In the end, I followed my gut, and spoke up. Speaking was the right thing to do, and speaking opened me up like a book.
Most everything I put in the journal seemed to go over quite smoothly with my evaluators, from the opening quotations to my long-winded, contrived, meandering metaphors. One thing I was critiqued on which I quite agree with was the lack of in depth explanations in my journal glossary. I likely should have spent more time making sure I explained things in a clear, concise way in the glossary.
It may have been interesting to read off all of my opening quotations one by one at the beginning of my presentation in order to illuminate how their tone and subject evolved over the course of the semester, and I definitely could have relaxed a lot more throughout the entire presentation. My nerves hindered me.
There were a few comments given at the end of my presentation that particularly resonated with me. Many of my evaluators suggested that I consider pursuing some form of technical writing because they felt that I should continue to write in my weird funky way about issues that interest me. I was, and am, deeply humbled. I also have a long way to go. This summer, I will not only look to continue the paths that I have traditionally tread, but I will consider how I might add more artistic pursuits to my schedule. I plan to begin to learn the guitar, as well as continue to read fascinating novels, and to refine my writing. Another common refrain was that I should go easier on myself. To this, I say that I will recover from my dissatisfactions, and reach an equilibrium state of happiness as quickly as possible. I am and will continue to be, a happy camper. At the same time, I pledge that I will never shy from challenges. I'm the only person I trust to solve my problems, and to achieve my goals.
These next brief moments are not the end, or the beginning, or the middle. They are all of the above. If life was neat, I could wrap it up in a nice little package, and put a bow on it. Sometimes I wish I could, but not today. Today, I look back at the path that I have walked, and I see warm memories, some bright, some fading, and some faded. But amidst these warped memories, I can sit down, and be comforted by the fact that I myself am the memories that I keep, the dreams that I carry, and the wind that makes my heart soar.