I was obsessed with the idea of “tomorrow,” in high school. Then, it meant graduation: Long white gowns and flying square caps and swinging blue tassels. It meant that I wouldn’t be confined, if you will, to a series of classrooms–many of them dauntingly disengaging–for nine long months of the year, temporarily absorbing what I usually deemed as “useless information that can be found with a bit of research if I ever really needed it, anyways.” Tomorrow was college, and pursuing an education that might not come as easily, but was at least something I was interested in and maybe even passionate about. And the ticket to tomorrow? Skimming universally boring textbooks and half-memorizing what other people defined as “important” (read: stuff that will be on the final exam). And so my high school education–in it’s most basic form–was doing whatever I needed to get by. And I was good at it. I had most of my teachers thinking I put in hours of effort when really, I was just putting in a little more than the people that didn’t bother to put in any. In a sense, I have them to thank for making me look good.
And then tomorrow came. I enrolled in a liberal arts college close to home, I started pursuing a degree I knew I was interested in (and even had the potential to be good at), and was again herded into classes about a bunch of things I still didn’t care about. In those select classes, I showed up and absorbed more “useless information that can be found with a bit of research if I ever really needed it, anyways.” I worked to get decent grades so my GPA wouldn’t cease to be a money tree during my college career. Sometimes, I was surprised and got something out of them; others, I was glad to never walk into again after Finals Week.
On a scale of Today-to-Tomorrow, it’s about 4:26pm in my college education era. I’ve picked up another major for the sake of practicality. I think I might actually be on my way to becoming something. The thing is, though, that I wish I could just keep learning. Not just things that will get me a job in my field, but the really interesting things that I just don’t have time for. I want to know how to pick out constellations in the sky and I want to read about previous missions to the moon. I’ve always been enamored by the view above when I step outside at night after my sleepy town has gone to bed. There aren’t enough lights to drown out the majesty of the night sky, and I still get up in the middle of the night and step onto my roof to revel in its beauty. It makes me want to know more about it; I want to know how to get there. I want to know more about physics and chemistry and architecture. Sometimes, I even want to learn about that more than things I’m learning in my self-chosen majors. Sometimes, I even find a refuge from endless hours of papers and projects when I simply take a break to find out what else is going on in the world. Today, I spent an hour watching a live stream of the NASA Open House Mars Panel at the Inauguration. I couldn’t think of another thing I’d rather be doing.
Graphic designer Jessica Hische makes a good point:
“The work you do while you procrastinate is probably the work you should be doing for the rest of your life.”
I have 16 years of school under my belt and I feel like I haven’t learned a thing. If I could do nothing but learn for the rest of my life–if the thought of it didn’t make my bank account cry and thrash and spontaneously combust–I would. But I can’t. Someday I have to enter into the “real world” and do real things and start a real family and I fear I won’t have time to listen to incredible people talk about how there might be life-sustaining potential on Mars or read for hours about social revolutions and the robots of the future as designed by Dunne & Raby.
Now, tomorrow is the real world. Tomorrow is where and when the life I’ve always dreamed of might actually begin. And don’t get me wrong, I have dreams very relevant to what I love doing and can see myself doing for the rest of my life, and I’m excited about them. Yesterday, all I wanted to be was finished with school. And today, I still want to be finished with school, as an institution. But I’ve made a vow to myself to never stop learning, never stop stepping outside of my comfort zone to learn something new, never stop discovering what the world has to offer. And never, ever stop living in Today.
“One of the reasons we as humans are so successful is that we have this driving curiosity, the need to explore.” -John Grunsfeld
realidream 