The Moving Ladder
One of society’s hurdles and setbacks of the college education experience is this predetermined idea that your life is supposed to dip downward with excitement after graduation. The common complaint is that after climbing the exciting ladder of our youth, the upward steps suddenly becomes non-existent. Suddenly, we’ve fell to the ground without the ability to pick up where we left off.
The reason for this, I suppose, is that students feel that their choice of career has become a path without options.
However, the American dream has been suffocated by nobody other than ourselves.
The appeal of the college environment, at least from what I’ve observed, is the freedom of having complete ignorance to unintended consequence. Assuming you take your studies semi-serious, the wound of most college dilemmas can be revitalized with a Tylenol and a text message.
Now, of course this isn’t a realistic life anecdote, or a healthy one at that. But, just because the maturity of our actions change post-graduation, this should not determine or correlate with our sensitivity to happiness.
The way I’m dealing with it, and have thought about it for many years, is this idea of a moving ladder. So what is for many a set of steps that suddenly dip into an endless abyss of post-college misery, I picture a upward moving ladder that moves with me, instead of away from it. The ladder is guided by a building block of intellect and experience that is determined by my own hustle and curiosity, rather than a job that fills the void of a college major.
It’s more about perspective than reality, and it’s more about how you think about a situation that determines your control of it. Any setting, college or elsewhere, is only reactionary to how we react to it, rather than the other way around.
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http://alexjmann.com/2009/07/14/freedom-aint-free/ Freedom Ain’t Free | alex j. mann (.com)
