I want to congratulate the seniors who have now completed a chapter in
their lives: high school. I’ve had the honor of connecting with so many of you,
and you’ve become dear friends and mentors. However, you’ll be starting a new
chapter in your lives now. Whenever that may take you, college, a future job, or
some other adventure, I wish you all the best. Be happy, be healthy, and be
sure to visit us!
I think
this a good segway for the ending of Sag
Harbor. (Nice timing Mr. Mitchell!) While Benji (or I guess Ben) completes the end
of his summer vacation, he looks back on his summer with some nostalgia and can
somewhat laugh at himself. Our ability to look back on our past and take a new
perspective is a sign of how we’ve grown. From what we’ve seen, I think the
dramatic one-event coming-of-age stories are meant to be… well, pure fiction.
Whitehead’s Sag Harbor is probably the
closest to genuine coming-of-age tales I’ve seen. Speak up if you disagree, but
if you look at a random day in your life, you probably didn’t do anything epic
or monumental to your personal growth. To be honest, my most used answer for
what I’m doing at any moment is “nothing,” just like Benji. You don’t wake up
one day and think you’re different— except maybe a growth spurt. Nine times out
of ten you don’t feel a big difference when you turn fifteen to sixteen or
sixteen to seventeen. However, what about looking back at subbie year? Every
picture, every old essay, most likely gives us all a cringe-fest.
We’re not aware of our
coming-of-age stories, but we all have times of adventure, danger (hopefully it’s
not a BB stuck in your eye), and first experiences (like your first time riding
a bike or driving with your new license). Isn’t that fun though? We can live in
the moment but then go back and relive (or I guess view) that memory in a new way. Not
to mention, we think differently as we grow up, each time with a growing base
of knowledge.
Aw I love you Tina. You have made my last year so fun and I am so glad we became friends through both PLT4M workouts and this class (I enjoyed the latter much more). I love that this post encapsulates exactly what we've come to learn as a class this year: that it isn't all about these big milestones, but our coming of age stories are really just gradual, even unrecognizable until we take a step back and compare our present self with our past self and look at all the growth. I think this is really a blessing for us humans: we really are able to enjoy each moment as it happens without being able to see what impact it'll make as a small chapter of our long novel called life.
ReplyDeleteI really like your point that coming of age kind of just happens--it's not a monumental thing, and we don;t really notice it. Somewhere along the way we just get older and mature up (maybe). It seems like we're doing nothing but time passes on by.
ReplyDeleteGood points. This reminds me of our first discussions of coming of age in this class. We more or less agreed that coming of age is a gradual process, where each event builds ourselves a little more. Sag Harbor brings the year to an end, but I'm sure we'll all have plenty of stories for our senior year.
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