Four years wiser.

By Christy Purington

Finally, after four years of balancing recreation with Greek life with schoolwork with family, I can retire my Bedford Handbook and envision the most anticipated event of my life: graduation from college. But while I’m reveling in self-indulgent senioritis, I can’t help but wonder: Where has the time gone?

While I have vowed never to repeat those phrases told to me time and time again lecture-style by those wise if not overbearing parents of mine, I cannot help but think of one in particular as I leave this play-world called college and enter real life: “If only I had known then what I know now.”

While I am watching the days disappear before my name is called and I walk across a portable stage into the daunting shadows of my future, I wish for a second that I knew when I was a freshman what I know now. I know now that it’s all right to occasionally leave the reading of an entire novel until the night before the midterm. I know now that it’s OK to eat Cheez-its and ice cream for dinner. I now know that you can often get away with not buying a textbook and treating yourself to a new CD instead. I know now that missing your family when you’re 21 years old doesn’t make you look stupid and that, as you grow older, they are the people who become your best friends. I know now that dirty dishes won’t do themselves and that phone calls mean more to most people than you think. I know now that worrying is as useful as trying to study on a Friday night and that each day that passes is one you will never get back.

As students, we get overwhelmed with the pressures of grades, jobs and maintaining a social life, making it difficult to fully appreciate this temporal experience, unable to recognize that these short years are ours for the taking right now. That, I wish I had known.

Had I known these things at the beginning of this journey, I would have taken each day, each breath a little bit slower. I would have taken five more minutes to send my best friend in San Diego a Halloween card and to stop by the office of that one professor I found absolutely brilliant but was too afraid to approach. I would have joined two more clubs, played five more intramural sports and introduced myself to 50 more people.

The things that I have learned in these four years are greater than those I learned in the 18 years before coming to college and may be greater than anything I learn after. And while I am ready and probably overly excited to make the huge leap from university life into big cities with new opportunities, ready to realize all I have been working toward, there is not a single part of me that won’t miss this naive, unpredictable, wonderful life that is college, and there’s not a part of me that doesn’t appreciate every moment spent here. So don’t be surprised if I pause on that stage for once last glimpse.