RESPONSABILITY

How good am I at taking charge of my life? At making sure that Im not getting ripped off at the supermarket? At watching my finances? At paying attention to my relationships? How good am I at taking care of my health?

Im not feeling like a very responsible person right now. It happens every time during vacations: I spend the first few weeks having a blast with friends, laughing my lungs out without a care in the world until, suddenly--I have a life to look after.

This time the thought hit me during the middle of the Winter Break; as opposed to last Winter Break, where it hit me during the last quarter. I suppose it's natural enough for the responsability question to come to mind earlier and earlier within each succeeding vacation period, as I get more mature and the experiences stack up.

On the other hand, I have some mighty intimidating choices to make in this coming semester. It's not that I haven't made up my mind about wanting to go away for the summer, or even about wanting to attend graduate school. The intimidating part is actually choosing to go to graduate school and to go away for the summer, i.e, looking into which schools have the programs and faculty/staff that suit my academic interests, filling out the applications, taking GRE prep courses, getting the recomendation letters, finding a summer program, writting the essays, sending the transcripts, etc., etc., etc. It is one thing to want something, choosing the thing you want is quite another.

Maybe my mind is helping me to adapt to this new, scary, daunting reality by making me face it extra early. This is my pennultimate semester as an undergraduate: the countdown to graduation has officially begun. In fact, maybe no one really gets that much more mature, maybe the load just gets heavier all the time and maturity is nothing more than learning to accept the extra weight--the way a fool would do. It can be difficult to draw the line between courage and naivete.

Then again, when you consider how much more say you have in what happens to you, it may be worth carrying that extra ton or two. This is not to say that the ends always justify the means--just that the ends justify the means in this case. There's no denying that some adults have less resposibilities than others or that some people have had to grow up much faster than others, but learning to live with this and with the innumerable other injustices of our world--while also accepting the task of maintaining one's moral and spiritual integrity in such a world--is precisely the burden of coming of age. Thus, any attempt to depict me as a fool for growing up fails on two counts:

A) Im taking responsability for my own actions and choices; unlike a fool, who would take responsability over another competent adult's life.

And B) In choosing to grow up, I allow an exponentially wider range of possibilities for myself, as well as much more creative autonomy over my life's direction.




You're Gonna Carry That Weight,



JA