What a difference five years make

So, I graduated from college five years ago today.¹

Right here would be the standard place for a link to that day’s commencement speech.²

Thankfully, in the midst of all that day’s revelry³ I was able to set aside some time to reflect upon that particular apex in my life, whichª I revisited just now.

What a difference five years make.

For whatever silly reason, as I’ve been pondering this particular milestone the first place my mind leaps is, “Man, another five will make ten! Oh, the places I’ll have gone by then!” Some sort of internal governor, however, catches me before I neglect to reflect too much upon today’s milestone, and for that I am thankful.¹¹

I’m reading a book about Robert Oppenheimer right now, and he was a pretty screwed up dude in his late teens and throughout his early twenties.¹² Psychological issues, medical issues, math issues, you name it. At the outset of his twenties things certainly didn’t look very bright for him.

The Dixon/Oppenheimer bit at precisely this moment hits ‘Empty’, but I invoke it for the¹³ simple reason that things for him got betterªª, before he even really noticed.

As have things for me gotten better.

Did you notice, though, that I didn’t say “perfect”²¹?

I hope you took the time to check out the picture below.²² That day I consummated things at Hendrix as an altogether shattered guy, and the smiles that day weren’t feigned by just professors whose mind my name had slipped. I was torn up inside, for all kinds of reasons,²³ and a solid two years or so passed before I felt like there was ground covered between that guyªªª and this one.

But I’ve made it, because things got better.

“Hope,” it has been said, “is a dangerous thing.” Maybe Hope was in Pandora’s Box not for any innocence on its part, or even the benevolence of the gods, but in fact because it is something that can make the world skip its programmed track. Maybe indeed it drives people insane.

Just like that atom that Oppenheimer et al smashed, when we dare entertain the world that the intersection that authentic hope, love and faith make, we are presuming to mess with something entirely out of our realm of experience.

We’re messing with power that can guarantee us a lot more than five more measly years, I promise you that.

1 In case you didn’t know, you know now that I’m sort of a freak for random dates, very few of which that actually matter.

2 Luckily it isn’t available on the Hendrix site. However, here is the one given the year before, to which I have returned on more than one occasion since that humid Saturday morning. It is one of the richest commencement speeches I’ve ever heard. And for something entirely unrelated, take a look at this.

3

a Most of which I won’t be sharing with you here.

11 I choose to interpret that governor as the inner working of the Spirit, if I dare be so bold.

12 This was before The Bomb, by the way.

13 Reading has also been pretty much all I’ve done when I’ve had free time the past two days, besides get pwned in Mario Kart.

aa I do know the end of the story, and how his life played out is one of the saddest you’ll find in American history.

21 And did you observe that I didn’t put that particular parenthetical thought in one of these ridiculous footnotes?

22 See 3, above.

23 See a, above.

aaa See 22, above.