SEASONS CHANGE
In the past week, the temperature in West Michigan rose to 72 degrees in Allendale, and dipped to below freezing with mild snow showers the very next day. It was the most bipolar weather conditions I’ve seen in winter here. Things have normalized since then, thankfully, but it was a sign of seasons changing: This Sunday the clocks roll forward an hour for Daylight Savings Time, March 19 is the first day of spring, and in three weeks I’ll be turning 35-years-old.
Seasons are changing.
In a month in a half, I will have graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in English Literature, launching into a new season of my life. Perhaps this is a characteristic of age, but the newness of change is less frantic or scary than it used to be. I’ve been through significant change more than I can count at this point, so the thought of leaving campus to head out into the real world isn’t so intimidating.
It is, however, intimidating to many of my classmates—most of whom are 14-15 years my junior.
Attaining a BA in English Lit has been wildly different than my first go-around with college. Instead of pursuing a degree in my early twenties, I went out in the world confident that I could do without one. This was true to an extent (I certainly could have committed to numerous career paths outside of a degree of some sort). The truth is that choices are limited without a slip of paper to get into other fields. With some luck, I was able to return to to college in my thirties, which was a radically different experience. Instead of being concerned with forming an identity and the constant anxiety of who I fit in with. I was free to do the work–which was the benefit of working in all those odd jobs: Showing up and completing a day’s work is the extent of responsibility. In the many years I spent working as as a freelance writer, in advertising, and as a preschool teacher, I found there was a common theme with every workplace and its hierarchy of people and rules: Every place is different and there’s no telling what it’s like until you’re in the thick of it.
Call it life experience or wisdom from age, but the road one takes is always going somewhere. In my experience, there isn’t much need to worry about where you’ve come from.
That’s why I’m always taken aback by the epidemic of fear of failure pertaining to test scores/assignments/papers and final grades. In the logistical sense of applying for scholarships (money for tuition), grades matter, but this concern is always insulated—no one outside of college cares about grades other than which university you acquired them from.
I spoke with a classmate in my thesis class who was convinced that the rest of her life was dependent on our professor’s decision pass or fail us. “Our professor has the power to decide what happens to me, doesn’t that scare you?” she asked me.
No. Of course not. That’s because college is another season of life—and like most seasons, you experience them while they occur but without much memory for when they change. Do you remember last summer? Vaguely, I imagine. Your recollection likely goes something like this:
“It wasn’t very hot, it was nice to get outside, and I went to the beach a few times.”
Right, which isn’t very specific. You’ve moved on and forgotten. College, like last summer, will be faintly memorable like the fading tan that’s in desperate need of more sunlight.
As I’m finishing the final month and a half of classes, I often think about getting back into the real world. It’s true that college has been a strange bubble existence with its own set of rules and expectations apart from the real world. However, the value of college has been a place to harness skills, think about the world in unconventional ways, and to truly expand the mind. The tragedy of graduation, I think, is that the faucet of knowledge is suddenly turned off and it’s all the harder to keep exposed anything challenging preconceived notions about the world.
Workplaces, families, friendships, and social media all make it incredibly easy to fall into a community of practice that insulates itself. There’s no more need to pick up a textbook, read studies, or cram for a test the following morning. There is no longer a forced path to unwittingly follow to betterment. In college there was (with its due criticisms, of course), but now there’s no incentive to keep going. Post-graduation means to adapt to a new world, one of employment and promotion, of hierarchy and financial makeup, of integrating into social systems that lead to that next stage of adult life.
Seasons change, I suppose.
I’ve yet to hear who the commencement speaker will be at Grand Valley State University, but one thing is for sure: This person will be older, experienced, and will likely give wisdom to those too young to understand the full impact of what’s being said. That’s natural—I’m just now learning things that I wished made sense a decade ago, and I’m confident that I’ll feel the same way about things I wish I had known at 35 in another ten years. Whatever this speaker will say to 2024 graduates, I can echo my own sentiment:
“Appreciate the seasons.”
They come and go. The leaves wilt, the snow accrues, and the muddy puddles of spring will evaporate into the paradise of summertime. It all changes so fast, but the lesson wasn’t in recognizing that seasons come and go—it was in spending the time to notice them in the first place.
So, when someone asks about last summer or what it was like to be in college, time travel back to when that place felt real again. Summer meant sunshine, and college meant glimpsing a world that appears a wondrous, complex organism–one that was never simple to define.
It’s much like the weather this past week: Summer and winter existed within 24-hours of each other in Western Michigan. I don’t truly understand anything.
I appreciate the seasons that remind me of this.
***
A NOTE ON AI GRAPHICS
Some of you may have noticed a distinct stylistic change in Weekly Post-Ed graphics form the past two weeks. There’s an obvious reason for that—they were designed using AI. And while I am naturally opposed to making graphics using AI, the past few weeks of trying out the technology has been fascinating. Viewing an image generate after transcribing a few sentences into ChatGPT might be the closest I’ve come to witnessing magic on the internet (not counting a few TikTok trends). An image is produced in under ten seconds with a level of detail that might take me hours to illustrate.
There are downsides, however. The design choices this current AI makes in graphics generation are very limited in my opinion (in terms of a flat, cartoony style), which makes it easy to identify images made with AI. There’s also a lack of authorship with the images, something that isn’t easy to explain, but something about the images feels lacking. If that makes any sense. Call it artistic integrity, but I can see the difference in something made by humans and not. There seems to be a lack of personal choice with AI generation.
All of this is to say these graphics are a short term experiment. I do not intend to rely on AI for graphics going further. The graphic designer in me will not tolerate the loss of originality with my own creative works.
So, that about explains it. Count on more personalized graphics going further, but every once in a while, if the graphic is interesting enough, I may use elements of AI as inspiration (which, frankly is where the technology thrives).
***
***
Wishing everyone as well as you can be. You’re not alone out there,
