The Age of Explorations

Our discussion in class today summed up the entire year. Unanswerable questions, differing views, relative morality and uncertain futures characterized nearly all of our discussions in one way or another. As much as the meandering, circling, abstract discussions pained me at the time, I might actually miss them next semester. This class was unique in that it centered almost entirely on us students with our interests, ideas, and concerns for the future. It will be nice to look back next semester when I'm tearing my hair out in Physics and to realize that someday my dream job might just fall into my lap.

I can't decide if this course made me more cynical or more hopeful about the world we live it. It seems that for every action, good or bad, there is an alterior motive and that nothing can be taken at face value. However, the speakers who came in led us to believe that nothing that we are stressing about right now is going to be the end of the world in the long run. Even the books we read varied from depressing cynicism (Goffman's view on funerals) to displays of extreme personal character (Augustine, Heinlein, Sophocles). I suppose that for every tragedy and militaristic saga there also exists someone capable of noble action. I guess that is the point, to realize that few things are wholly good or wholly bad, but it is up to us to decipher the grains of each in the people and events of our lives.

I'll admit that it is tough for me to really reflect on the whole semester. The combination of my massive stress level and sleep deprivation with the mind-boggling amount of stuff that happened is probably the culprit for this impediment. However, I think that it will be interesting to see where this class progresses from here. In the UC sense, to see how we compare, but also in regard to the vast diversity of views held by our class, I think that it is unlikely that any two of us will end up in the same place three and a half years from now.

So with that nod to the past and a little look towards the future, I'll go ahead and end my last blog post with a little nostalgia for being able to publish my opinions to the world and be forced to due it regularly for fear of failing the class. For lack of any coherent words of my own, I would like to end with a quote that I think sums up the class quite nicely:

"Like the sign over the urinal says, 'You hold your future in your hand'"

~ Lew Welch