Adieu

Life, they say, is a learning experience. Learning itself though is a life-changing experience. After having been through 21 years of it, this would seem about the right time to write a denoument for that chapter of my life. A point to stop reading and start doing. With a brief summary of how it's all been of course, the journey from a bumbling, salivating toddler to an assured, still-salivating (but at totally different things) man.

Of all the years of the 21, it's probably the 4 in college that have the steepest learning curve. For one, in college, you're pretty much on your own. You're past the totally arbitrarily-defined age where the society deems you an adult and are hence supposed to know what to do when a 'situation' arises. With this comes a freedom, one that you never had before and one that urges you to question, explore, understand and master things at a pace which you never could have before. For before now, the potter's hand that is the society and the family and the relatives was still closely around the clay that was you, restricting you from flying in all arbitrary directions so that you have one basic shape defined. That job done, the hands move away, and now the pot is ready to take any shape it wishes to.

The adult world brings with it,its share of emotions that weren't present before either. And thus form the feelings of 'me' and 'I' and other such things which are bracketed conveniently under the single category called ego. Ego is not such a bad thing, as long as it stays at self-respect. But it almost always does not. An inherent desire to assert one's views in a hall of equals is where it all begins, and there is no way that all opinions are going to be concurrent on any issue. On a minor scale, it is funny, and mostly people end up laughing. Sometimes it snowballs, and people become, well... others. And when such things happen, it's a scary, but timely reminder of how this is just the tip of the iceberg in the world that lies ahead. And at such times, you wish you never did grow up.

It's not all bad though. Experience, I believe, is truly the greatest teacher ever. You can read and listen and observe and note down a variety of things from any of the innumerable sources available to the techno-savvy person today, and yet, none of them would do anything to you as experiencing it first-hand would. Because if you don't try, you don't really know. And that is why the curve of four years of college has the slope that it has. It is a world which leads to innumerable other worlds, most of which you didn't even know existed. And you find that people of these worlds are not aliens either, they're just you, a couple of years ago, a couple of years hence, those you wish you can become, and of course, those you wish you'll never be.

The most important thing is what you take away from your experience and it is now that you take away only the good. You're still fearless, the world has still no scarred you so much that you are afraid to commit the smallest error in life, and you've just got into thinking big. Thinking big, that amazing feeling you get when your fundamental stance towards life changes from 'Why' to 'Why not'. Enlightenment is epiphanic. Experience just prepares you for it. And that moment on, you know you're ready to take on the world, and whatever it may throw at you.

There's so much more that affects you during the journey that is college life. New friends and acquaintances, trying out things you thought you could never do, going places, playing games, eating and sleeping together (in a strictly gay sense)... things you can be sure can never be experienced again. But then, that's what they say about the only thing constant being change and all that. Thus it is, that while the blood is young, the body is eager and the mind is willing to go out there and take over the world, one part of the heart knows, deep within itself, that these will be 4 years you'll never get back.

And that's why there's that lump in your throat when you realize that this is where it ends.