My first week with the Plant City Observer we were tasked with putting together our yearly Journey section, highlighting the graduating classes from Durant High School, Plant City High School, Strawberry Crest High School and Simmons Career Center.
That week I walked through the metal doors of the event center at the Florida State Fairgrounds with a camera around my neck, tasked with capturing the final moments that you seniors would share together as a class.
In those moments I couldn’t help but think about my own graduation, sitting in that same room on an early June morning in 2013. A graduation that feels like forever ago, even at just 26 years old, and will never again feel any closer than it does now.
I remember the excitement, not just for the unknown future that I prepared to embark on as I enrolled at USF that summer, but for reaching another milestone. Another checkmark passed.
For all of the excitement that was there at the time, I didn’t quite stop to think about how much things would change. Some friends would head all over the country to different colleges and we would lose touch, some would start working. But that was the day that I also lost my first love of baseball. The game that I began playing when I was four, the game that brought me some of my closest friends and taught me more about triumph and failure and resilience than anything else could.
“The game never ends, it just changes,” a coach told me.
In some ways he was right, but for me in that moment, it ended. I never played another game of baseball, no matter how much love for the game I still carry with me.
Some of my friends watched the game end there along with me, some went on to have successful college careers and some even played professionally at the minor league level. But when we get together every Sunday for our weekly softball game, they don’t talk about that. They talk about how much fun we had playing together for those four years at King High School. Working together for years, sweating together for years, bleeding together for years and ultimately walking off the field together one last time as it came to an end.
Looking back now I realize that we often get caught up with looking ahead at what’s next and how we can’t wait to get there. When you’re young, you can’t wait to start high school. Then you can’t wait to turn 16 and start driving. Then you can’t wait to turn 18, to eventually graduate, to take whatever next step follows, to turn 21 and so on.
Maybe in your case it wasn’t baseball. Maybe for you it was football, or FFA or Chess Club or anything else that you may wish you had just a few more moments to enjoy. And as much joy and as many amazing experiences as you will find in the months to come after graduation, in the years to come after graduation, in the rest of your lives, there will always be moments that will come to an end and moments that you’ll look back on fondly and miss.
The best years of your lives are ahead of you, so this is surely not saying that I look upon the past with sadness or that you should look toward the future with fear.This is an amazing moment that all of you have reached. But as you head in this new direction and take this next step, whichever way that may take you, don’t be so quick to look ahead to the next milestone that you never take the time to appreciate the journey itself.
While you have the rest of your life to reach new milestones, each and every one of those little journeys along the way only lasts so long. Enjoy them.