I remember exactly how I felt the day of the farewell (little graduation) in Grade 7. Old friends and I, sat at round the hall table, everyone was laughing and enjoying themselves. Every one of us looking all nice. There I was, as a little boy, looking at these people and emotionally thinking I will probably never see these people again; It was a bitter sweet moment really. I thought about all those memories we had made together and how in just a transition it will all just fade away.
That was my first encounter with how graduation changes things, although it is a great moment in one’s life in education, it’s a moment where you realize life is moving forward, that we make memories and continuously make new ones. In a deeper aspect, you tend to want to question what the point of it all is? Making these memories, meeting the people we meet, and then somewhere down the line these people will all just become a memory.
I was having a conversation with my friend Mlondi once when he said, “Once people get their degrees, life moves on,” in that moment I thought about how true that was, I thought about all the people I’ve met in life and how after we all graduated these people became a memory, while others still exist as friends, others exist as moments, a blip in one’s movie really.
In high school I met quite a lot of people I considered my friends. While some today don’t even know what my favourite food/series might be, but some still exist today, and I call them my best friends/family. However, during my life in high school, I didn’t see myself detaching from these people, they made me feel whole.
So, what happened? Life happened.
People tend to do this thing called moving on; Are we all familiar with it? People move on in this thing called Life. I can recall specific moments where I wondered what was going to happen to all of us. One time it was during our final study session; We had a study group, normally done at my house. I remember looking at these gentlemen, we were all laughing that day, making fun of the words we were learning and I thought, I hope we all make it out together. It devastated me when not all of us passed. I was so hurt I wanted to cry. In that moment I saw how life had a different plan for all of us. I wanted to go to varsity, others wanted to get jobs, others were going to figure life out. I understood that I might not see some of these guys ever again. It was fun but at the same time it was heart breaking.
I recently went on Facebook to look for one particular person, to see if she was still alive and check on how she was doing, I didn’t find her. But I found something else instead, a lot of people from High school, most who were still friends with each other, connected. Suddenly all the memories flooded; I recalled the jokes, the teachers, the crushes and everything in between. I saw how life had changed a lot of people. How we all live different realities, whoever mattered more back in high school didn’t matter now, all that was just a past time that we all had to go through.
You don’t get used to it really; This, having to detach or move on from people you made memories with and created stories with. It’s never an easy transition but once it happens you understand that life has a different purpose for everyone, what that purpose is, uhm I don’t know. In University I was even more sad, after having created all these memories for 3-5 years with these humans, it hurt to understand that I will never see them again, and I haven’t seen most of them since then.
For me, I think the one thing that made it worse was that I stayed too long in varsity, continuously doing degree after degree, and that gave me an opportunity to connect with more people, and horribly, having those people vanish afterwards while I still remained. Mlondi made another valid point in our conversation when he said, “People think life will always be at UKZN (University), South Africa and don’t realize that they have to move on.” University can make you feel like you’re at home, like this is the rest of your life. It’s the worst comfortable feeling ever, worse because once you realize life will not end there, you feel like you don’t know your way forward.
I think the degree is quite short, but it becomes long because it offers so much than just education; It offers a social understanding of life, for those who care to venture that part of it. Everyone chooses their own way to experience it really. It gives you those, much needed lessons that no one at home will ever teach you. So, it is no wonder it becomes a bitter sweet ending.
Author: JC Zondi