On Schoolmageddon and Schrödinger's Cat

End of school-years always make me a little melancholy. Am I relieved that the grindstone will shortly be removed from my nose? Oh, absolutely. When examining the wall where you've progressively recorded your height over the years, marking the great, oblivious achievement of your own cell growth and regeneration, you never wish to return to that smaller world of your 3'7" self. But the reason why we even keep those reminders of how once we were less is the same reason why I want to snatch these last few precious days and just hold on to them for a little while. That short distance of two inches between two black lines on a blank, plaster wall signifies a year. And a year is just so much. This year was just so much.

You'd think that after two years at college, I'd finally "get it down" (whatever "it" is... still haven't figured it out...). But life is leveled to make you never feel like a pro. If you feel like a pro, you're probably doing something terribly wrong and will want to check up on that. That's kind of the beauty of proactive living, though. If you're progressing then you should never be bored.

A week from this moment, I will be on a rickety plane over the blue Atlantic, finally on my way to the land of lochs and haggis. All I can think about is that long walk from Edinburgh to London. I will pick up one hideously clunky, hiking boot-shod foot and place it in front of another, and do it again, and again, and keep doing it until I've lost count and all the steps blend together in a sea of bleak, heath-coated moors. I'll probably go mad.

If I don't, though, I hope some sort of transcendence happens. I hope that somewhere along the trail, at some point in those hundreds of miles, I'll find the chain that's been dangling in the dark and snap on that light bulb that's been gathering dust somewhere out in land of destiny. Destiny is probably the wrong word, though, because I'm a humanist... Prospect? Potential? Schrödinger's cat? All I know is that everything I used to be and will be and am are somehow rolled into one and instead of viewing myself as a series of timely marks, I'll finally see the eternalness of my being. "Am" is not linear. But being flat, second-by-second people, we have to add a "was" and a "will be" to wrap our mortal minds around it. Perhaps it's heretical to marry the principles of divine nature and quantum mechanics, but I'm hoping for a moment in the journey where I can stand in the middle and see both the future and the past, smudge those two inches marked on the wall (such a small measurement  for something so immeasurable), and feel the same cells I've always been split and multiply into something I've never been before. It's always been me. But it's never been this. 

Maybe it really will be just a hike across the United Kingdom. But nothing is ever just a space between two black lines on a plaster wall.