Reflections around graduation

I'm not sure about this whole graduation thing ... perhaps its because I'm not feeling well. However I'm not sure if this 'unwellness' is related to my flu like symptoms or to a more metaphysical malaise. The slight temperature that I'm carrying, the dull ache running across my shoulders, the tension in my neck; perhaps all these things conspire to tell me that I'm not 100% behind turning up tomorrow? So much has changed since starting the degree; doubly so since I first countenanced undertaking it back in 2000 / 2001 (?) in Japan. Angela, that person who encouraged me then to do this, she now plays parts in other people's lives. Dim are the memories of why I actually chose to do it anyway. However I remember her beside me back then but sitting behind and slightly to my right in that Internet cafe with the cheerful owner in the 'trendy thing' department store behind the railway station in downtown Kokura. A beathless sentence for a breathless country.

I remember because today I was online at Uni via wireless internet using Apple Airport technology, I didn't realise it at that moment, but today I had been looking at the same website that I searched through four years ago whilst using that ISDN internet cafe connection back in Japan. My black coffee completed a journey lasting 4 years - all over in the blink of an eye. So thinking about this now, I'm smiling at the thought of all the keystrokes typed by me on computers over the years. I'm smiling also for a deeper reason, because at least in part I've made a connection with my past and folded the page of my life in such a way as to make two points connect and be meaningful. It's a creased sheet of paper is my life.

I'll go then to the graduation and enjoy it for what it is - a brief moment of celebration, not of achievement but of passing on - all of us in that room will be thinking our thoughts and remembering our pasts; past lives, past occupations, and indeed the people who have passed through. So much happens every day that it would be (and is), easy to miss out on what is happening to us. But in the quite moments, if we are lucky, we come to think and understand who it is that we are and what it is that we are about. To write is to understand oneself, to scratch about in the mists of one's life and start to pull out surprisingly concrete things; things which were there all along, unnoticed yet all the while troubling us like sharp splinters of reality that get under one's skin.