High School Never Ends

The title is a great song by Bowling for Soup.   If you haven’t heard it, check it out.  It’s also been on my mind recently.

I have been watching movies while I quilt and I recently saw Sunshine Cleaning.  I won’t give the story away but I went into it thinking it was going to be a comedy.  It wasn’t so much a comedy as I had hoped.  In one part, the main character runs into some people from high school and is not exactly where she thought she’d be in life at that point.  It got me thinking.  Is anyone where they thought they would be when they were still in high school, oblivious to the real world, and making plans?  I almost think it would be boring to have everything turn out just as you expected as a teenager.  And I say this as a person who had been all around the world and seen a lot of interesting cultures and things by the time I got my diploma.

My plan was concise, ordered, logical, and perfectly timed right down to when I would marry or have children, as if anyone can really time those things ten or twenty years in advance.  My plan was idealized and simplistic, too.  And boring.  And safe.  I even had my back-up plans if this or that didn’t fall into place.  Those plans were boring, too.  The commonality was they assumed a happily ever after, no setbacks, nothing unplanned.  I would have had a better chance winning a lottery than I did of having all of my plans fall into place.

Real life brings the unplanned, the variables of other people, and the unthinkable.  Real life challenges you to grow, to become more than you were.  Real life is not safe.  It certainly hasn’t been boring, either.

Back in high school I never imagined the trials and traumas that life would bring.  Back then, I never could have imagined the me I have become by struggling through those things.  I never knew I could take so many hits and keep getting back up.  That person I planned was as boring and safe and simplistic as my plans were.  I think of the person I thought I would be now, and who I am, and I choose me.

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