A Little Month

Four weeks ago I boarded a plane, and cried as I watched the east coast disappear into the distance and under the clouds. Four weeks ago I got my first look at the apartment that would become my home. Four weeks ago I arrived ready (or not) to begin my next grand adventure. And yet, this grand adventure really began far more than four weeks ago. It began before apartment hunting, before graduate school applications, and even before I had any clue it had begun.

Come with me now on a journey through time and space, to my senior year of high school. Normally this is not a time that I look on with particularly fond memories, but it was in this time that I made decisions that would shape my future in ways I could only imagine. I would have said that my choices of college and major were entirely too influenced by a certain young man, except that even then, in the height of high school foolishness, a plan was afoot. Fast forward two years - spent in Physics labs, traveling across the country to present my research, and generally discovering exactly what I did not want to spend the rest of my life doing - to my sophomore year of college when, on a whim, I decided to take a class on Chaucer. It was then that the course of my academic career, and my life, changed.

I would spend the next two years carrying my Norton Anthology of English Literature to Modern Physics lectures and my Biophysics text book to poetry seminars. It was an insane life, but it was mine, and I loved it. I had discovered that the diversity of my passions and interests was something to embrace - though how Schrodinger and Shakespeare harmonized was not always clear. Until now.

The journey that began all those years ago, with all of its twists, turns, and tangents along the way, has lead me to where I arrived four weeks ago. If I have learnt anything in the last six years, it is that there is a plan and that I, sure as anything, am not in charge of it. Lord only knows where I will be in another six years, or even in another four weeks. For now, mine is not to question why, mine is but to do and dive into what is before me.