Piece of Paper

Over the past few months, with some of my friends graduating and the fact that I might actually have to return to school in the fall, I've been thinking about the piece of paper that we get at the end of four years. The words from an Avenue Q song spring to mind whenever I begin to think about something like this. "What do you do with a BA in English? Four years of college and plenty of knowledge have earned me this useless degree."


When I return to finish my degree, I will be going back to study music history. There are few things in life that are less useful for living a day to day life than knowing the periods in Beethoven's life. Actually, there may be and I will learn all of those things over the next two years of my life. When I do graduate with this degree, there will be very few people in the world who will want to hire me. The ones who will will be in L'Arche communities which doesn't bother me at all. It's actually what I want to happen.

When I do get to hang a piece of paper on my wall as my parents and friends do, I'm not sure how I will feel. That piece of paper will just be that. A piece of paper with letters on it that say I may or may not have learned something over the past four years. The paper cannot show the blood, sweat or tears that went into earning three letters to add to my name. It doesn't show the 18 hour days that I put into school work or the hours I carve out of my day to try and relax. It doesn't show the heartbreak, the pain, the moments of pleasure and happiness. It cannot show the friends, the conversations, the moments when you want to completely give up and think that you can't do it anymore. In the end it is just a piece of paper. Any worth that is in comes from what value we place in and what we believe it to mean. If it has no power to us, then it also has no power over us.

I am working so hard right now to get that piece of paper to hang on my wall. And I have no idea why. I don't want something else that is going to fall me around for the rest of my life. I'm ready for the rest of my life to start right now, but I'm not sure where that is going to lead me. The months when I'm not working 18 hour days to meet the requirements to finish this degree I live at work and work 20 hour days. Sometimes longer than that. What I do during the summer is what I love the most. The four months seem like a year because of what I really do here. And there is nothing more or less that I want to do with my life right now. I have to leave this for eight months out of the year in order to gain this piece of paper, and I'm not so happy with that right now. When I hang the piece of paper on whatever wall I will have at the time, it will show the fifty thousand dollars that have gone into keeping me at school and the hours that I have spent working on terrible projects. Whether or not I want to finish this degree, I will. I will finish this and hang the paper with some special letters and some meaning to someone else. And maybe one day it will have more meaning for me.