September has come and gone, and I’m not sitting behind a desk and taking notes. This is the first fall in many, many years that I find myself out of the classroom. I was excited to graduate from that stage of life and enter that “real world” I kept hearing about. Working through the summer was an exciting taste of adult life, but now fall is here and it’s time to go back to the classroom to sit, adsorb, and regurgitate the teachings of wiser women - except it isn’t! Naturally, the grass is always greener where your ass isn’t, so my yearning for the smell of new books isn’t a total shock. Neither is my desire to go to work in my pajamas… What is a shock is my desire for knowledge. All of a sudden, my brain feels light and useless! Yesterday I found myself picking up an old textbook for some “light reading”. Is this is just an old habit? I don’t think so!
I’d like to send a wake up call to all entry-level, recently graduated, employees. Just because we’re out of school doesn’t mean we have to surrender to the daily grind. Work is exhausting, life is even more exhausting, but I don’t believe we have to let go of all our curiosity. All these posts keep coming back to the life-work balance we’re all looking for; how to distract ourselves from monotony, how to keep our lives interesting and our experiences new. Something about being in school kept the feeling of excitement and anticipation alive. Graduation tends to feel like we’ve arrived somewhere, somewhere concrete and finite. I have to keep reminding myself that this isn’t true. That what we commute to everyday doesn’t have to overpower our lives (unless we want it to), and that we can still be curious about the world and our ever changing place in it. I may just be trying to prioritize my life, or I may need to go back and hide in the academic world. Perhaps it’s time to revisit that grad school idea…
