The best laid plans...

It seems there was more truth in the admonitions and warnings espoused by our forebears than any of us would have like to acknowledge or admit. For twelve years of our lives, during one of the most influential periods of our lives, we sit in crowded classrooms and toil in near faceless anonymity completing one assignment after the next on the belief that somehow that knowledge will serve us in our future. The irony is that the workload is despised but the youth and the revelry shared with our peers is the only thing making it bearable. We endure harsh words, humiliation, and the angst of adolescence with a grin because we know we are not alone in our tribulations.

But somewhere along the way something happens. We sacrifice something to gain something else. We give up a social life to focus on studies in the hopes of accessing a top shelf college and giving us a leg up on our peers. Others relegate their scholastic pursuits to a trunk bound cargo and instead relish every visceral moment of their young teens with a ferocious intensity.

Regardless of which path is chosen, there is one thing that remains a constant for every person, the want for it to all be over. A fervent wish to be done with the dramas, workloads, expectations, droning of teachers, and mindless reinforcement exercises that consume the years of our scholastic careers is the driving force behind our need to be done with it all. Summers cut short give way to autumn days that are far too hot and attention spans barely capable of receiving information let alone assimilating it. But everyday we endure brings us closer to the bright lights of our futures.

During those days we have a feeling of invincibility. Drinking before our time, indulging in drug use and rationalizing that we’ve got a life time to kick the habit or resolve the ill effects, staying out past curfew, lying to authority, defying any kind of established order, adopting promiscuous habits, and a myriad of other forms of rebellion form the hallmarks of our behavior. We seek out an identity crafted from experience and action, all of it, serving to define us.

All too soon though, we find the days of high school fading away and the years take a toll not previously felt. We have no more summers of care free fun and adventure, the promiscuous habits of before give way to pregnancy or disease, relationships get serious or end, friends drift away, college plans are dashed to the ground or bear fruit from years of labor, and an entire world we thought full of possibility and opportunity comes crashing in with almost none of its previous grandeur. Good grades mean little in the grand scheme, a scoreboard of who had the most boyfriends or girlfriends is deemed repugnant, and a litany of yearbook well wishing comes down to obligatory sentiment with very little meaning.

Despite all of the somber repercussions we press on, hopeful that the bleakness of impending debt from student loans, a life of responsibility we’re just not ready for, and a loss of our social standing within a dynamic that didn’t really matter much to begin with, is less traumatizing than it actually seems. We carry on, hoping to blend into the herd and follow blindly in the footsteps of those who’ve gone before us, praying that the road is littered with fewer broken dreams that the trailblazers ahead of us.

And the fulcrum upon which we turn is our continued associations with those that made the trek with us. We call them friend, share all of our lives with them, depend and rely on them for support and camaraderie, but really most of us remain far too guarded and closed off to connect on any real or serious level. But the delusion is a welcome respite from the truth that most of us made the journey alone.

So the question to all of this is, do we really ever make friends? Do any of us truly find someone to come with us on our journey of life? We swap out people we claim are our best friends for life partners and the whole dynamic breaks down when we realize that we’ve never been fulfilled. Perhaps we need to take a second and really evaluate what keeps us bound to the people we call friend. I say take a piece of paper and list five unique attributes that apply to the people closest to you that you admire in them. Not qualities like, “He’s nice” or “She’s sweet” everybody embodies those things to a degree, I want you all to really take a good hard look at the people closest to you and determine, perhaps for the first time, why you allow them to be so close.