“A bitter cucumber? Throw it away. Brambles on the path? Walk around them. That is sufficient. Do not go on to say: Why do such things exist in the world?”-Marcus Aurelius
Endings are hard. When stripped of the romantic, sensationalized pain, they’re just plain hard.
This has been a week of endings in my life. I graduated, two days after it was announced that my college was closing for good.
The ceremony was a strange mix of celebration, pain, and a strange and dissonant guilt. The endless congratulatory jargon which inevitably accompanies such an event passed for nothing more than misguided formalities. Words affirming our hard work and dedication only placed a greater emphasis on the injustice towards the hundreds of dedicated students with nothing to show for their work and even less of a plan to move forward.
There is an inevitable tendency in such situations to seek answers. As though the pain felt might be cured by some elusive explanation. This of course is ridiculous when placed on the table for examination.
Anger and strife often accompany difficulty. They have a subtle way of removing ones responsibility to act and instead lead one to try to explain. However, as I said earlier, this does no good.
It would seem when faced with insurmountable injustice and hardship, we are left only with one option. To act. Embrace that which is the only constant in our universe, change. Marcus Aurelius once said “Does man fear change? What can come to be without change? What is more dear or belongs more to the nature of the Whole? …Can you be fed, unless your nourishment undergo change? Can any other useful thing be done without change? Do you not see then that for you to be changed is precisely similar, and similarly necessary to the universal nature?”