Other than New Year's, this is the time of taking stock: spring cleaning, graduation, next steps, anticipation of summer, what comes next! I am now two years out from LA, the Getty, and am now a "seasoned" New Yorker (what kind of season?), a Master of things according to NYU...now what? The things I learned during my master's study aren't what I expected to learn, but they are valuable lessons nonetheless.
First: I learned that life is not fair. It just isn't. Bad things happen to good people and usually not one-at-a-time, but simultaneously, in shitstorm fashion. But if you can get over this, and stop expecting life to be something it's not, there is so much beauty and joy still to be had. I learned to let go of things over which I have no control.
Second, things will never go the way you planned - and maybe that's a good thing (if you can let go of perfectionist tendencies). I planned on being somewhere entirely different at 28, but had I ended up there I wouldn't have had quite the amazing joyride I stumbled into. In my ruthlessly careful planning, I never anticipated or accounted for the world's generous, spontaneous bounty: travels across the world, jobs I applied to on a lark that changed my life, meeting friends in the strangest and best friends, and the miracles of technology that have enabled those friendships to flourish.
Three, you are your own worst enemy and best advocate. You have to believe in yourself, or you are already defeated. I have been blessed with people who, like mirrors, reflect my light back to me when I cannot see it myself. I have been fortunate enough to have friends who share their light with me when I foolishly allow my own to go out, friends who fly across the country to hold my hand in a moment of lonely trouble, friends who forgive my missteps and celebrate my surefooted-ness when it happens. But it is most important that I believe in myself.
Fourth - I should not ever doubt the spring. Having come from LA, I was unprepared for the seasons. But this taught me something important about how we grow. We are oftentimes removed from the cycles of natural decay and renewal. I learned not to doubt the spring, that she comes inevitably if I am but patient enough. And I learned to look for her signs in the frigid-seeming gaze of winter, to search within myself for the bulb bursting to bloom. We need times of dormancy and times of tenacious spurting growth, but we need them both. Upon seeing spring again, I cherished her more fully, every bud, every startling shot of green, the raucous chatter of birds reemerging outside my window, the caress of spring on my bare arms...I had failed to appreciate nature's beauty and bounty. I learned to love the thing for what it is, to rejoice in the moment, to appreciate the stages of the process and witness my own sometimes painful but always necessary growing.
Finally, despite its seeming obviousness, I learned that everything has another story. In anthropology (and much of the humanities), that is what we look for. I learned to appreciate turning issues over, to see them from new perspectives, to look for the stories that have been left out, and to see things in their entirety: with their full nuance, diversity, and complexity, rather than to gloss with easy assignations of binaries or "good" versus "bad." There is always another story, another perspective, another way of seeing things. Thus things become not good or bad, but meritorious on their own terms.
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