The Final Sunday

For the past 13 years of my life, the "Final Sunday" -the last Sunday of summer vacation- has been a day full of anticipation, some, though not much, anxiety, and loads of excitement. I knew what to look forward to, who to look for, where to go, and what to do. I had some sort of an idea regarding what was behind the grand grey toll gate marked "Monday", marking the end of the road we call "summer vacation."

But since that hazy summer evening in the month of May when we threw our bright blue caps of finalization and freedom (some call them "graduation caps") in the air, nothing is what it used to be.

There is no more "school" that I need to get to.

No more classes which I only take because I have to, knowing that they will not help me at all in the rest of my life.

No more 8.30-16.30 "work hours" every single weekday.

But also no more familiar faces in the morning.

No more of letting my feet do the work as I walk down the halls I've walked down for many years, not even thinking about where I'm going.

No more of seeing people I've learned to write with.

Tomorrow, I go to my first class in my college. Unlike the past 13 years, this Sunday night, I don't know what I'll be facing tomorrow. I don't even know where the building my class is supposed to be in is. This time, I have no idea-what-so-ever regarding what's behind the grand grey toll gate. This Final Sunday is different.

People, by habit, don't like change. They want things to remain the same. They want to stay in their comfort zone. For thousands of years, since the dawn of humanity, people have fought against change, although, in the end, they've always had to succumb to it. People who saw new ways of belief were hung, burnt alive, or worse - before, of course, millions of people started following that new belief.

Because time passes, flows right on through like a river, and whether you want it or not, you are bound to get caught in the current of change. You can either try to swim against the current, paddle uselessly, while everyone and everything you know goes right past you, or you can embrace it and adapt.

In the end, that's what all creatures do.

We adapt.

It's what we do to survive.

So tomorrow, I will be surrounded by a brand new environment-something like I've never seen before. And even though I am somewhat anxious for the first day of the rest of my life, I am also terribly excited. Because tomorrow morning there awaits an experience which I can't begin to imagine the likes of. It won't be the same old summer morning where I'll look out for my friends from preschool -they, some-thousand kilometers away, also are trying to adapt to their new environment.

Tomorrow morning, I will begin to process the "different" into the "usual"; grinding the "unknown" into the "known".

Maybe we have it all wrong.

Maybe, instead of trying to adapt to new circumstances every time, we should try and adapt to change itself. That way, change will seem ordinary. Change will be new "usual".


But then again, where's the fun in a life without the unknown, undiscovered, and the not-yet-experienced?