Managing life after graduation and the “big tomorrow”

Up until the end of college, there are established, comfortable benchmarks for success; if not easily reached then at least easily understood. You have your grades, your extracurriculars, and you have the things you’re supposed to have. There was a terrible realization for me when these things inevitably slipped away as graduation approached; when I was let loose after four years with a great yearning to make the most of my life, and a deep sea of uncertainty about what that life might look like. Amidst that sea of uncertainty, the Benedictine Volunteer Corps stood out to me in a way that, honestly, was not particularly deep or introspective. One year somewhere else for a good cause. The kind of thing that sounds impressive or adventurous. The kind of thing with quotes on the website about how it changed people’s lives. All very well and good.

There is a moment on the first night, jetlagged and weary, where it all of a sudden sinks in. After turning off your brain and sleepwalking through a few airports, you’ll lay in bed ready to sleep but fully unable to, and think to yourself “oh my God, I’m going to be here for a year.” Uncertainty again, doubt. But the scale is different. Tipsy and melancholic on graduation night, I wondered about the big “tomorrow.” The tomorrow that really meant the rest of my life. In a too short bed with a scratchy pillow and 5 hours until daylight in the guest room of a Benedictine Monastery in Puerto Rico, I wondered about the little tomorrow. Like, the one that’s in five hours.

For the next long while, that was the only tomorrow I thought about. The one in which I would meet the monks, befriend the monks and then non-confrontationally ask the monks for a different bed and different pillow. The one in which they would happily agree. The one in which I would get a tour of the school, go to a teaching orientation in Spanish that I didn’t fully understand and get four classes a day of high school English to teach. And after many, many tomorrows, I finished grading some papers and realized that tomorrow I had to write something for The Record, and at last I think again about the big tomorrow.

Stressful though it may sound, as young adults we have entered into the times in our lives that really, truly matter. When we set for ourselves a first, rudimentary path forward in life, we do so with the knowledge that we’re essentially eyeballing it. Things are going to go wrong, goals are going to shift, and at some point we’re probably going to find ourselves somewhere we never meant to go.

I don’t think I originally meant to go to Puerto Rico. I think I meant to escape from that sea of uncertainty. To have something to say when people asked what I was going to do after college. I meant to spend a year in a way that I could confidently say was abstractly “valuable” before the year even began. What happened instead was that I was cast into an even more basic sea of uncertainty and predictably shown that I could swim.

I have done things in the Benedictine Volunteer Corps I could never have predicted. I’ve grown and changed faster than I think I ever have before. And of course, I still don’t know where I’m going. There’s no pill for that, no way to remove uncertainty. But you can learn to deal with uncertainty, to be more confident in the face of it. You can learn how quickly you can change. How much room for fulfillment there really is in all tomorrows, little and big. There are more specifics, of course. Monastic life, language immersion, exploring wondrous environments.

Tune in some other time for a different volunteer to fill you in on those, because I’m just about at the word limit. But take this with you: we’ll never again be this young, we’ll never again be this free to discover who we are and what the world is like. We’ll never again have this many tomorrows to learn to be excited for