Aris Pastor

This year, I’ve grown obsessed with time. There’s something the poet Richard Siken wrote once: “We are all going forward. None of us are going back.” Time reaches invariably forward, and as we are limited by our humanity, we have no choice but to move in the same direction. There is something captivating to the idea of tragedy, of inevitability built just outside of human consciousness, being simultaneously stuck and unstuck in time, yet never able to manipulate it. Never able to change it. It can feel easier, almost, to think of yourself in those terms.

And yet, if I have learned anything from my time at NASH, from the friends I’ve made and lost, from the district I’ve lived in my entire life, it’s this: joy is a process, not an achievement. I spent the entirety of junior year under massive amounts of academic pressure and stress, but I made some of my best friends that year, people who have redefined the way I see my life. So maybe there is no changing the past, and maybe we are all springs set to snap in some grand tragedy, so maybe there is failure and loss and pain in this story, but the sun has been glowing orange at my bus stop every morning. There are plants by my window that have been green for months. Every week, I walk half a mile to drink tea with my best friend.

During freshman year, I thought a life was something you get after all the prizes, after maintaining a 4.0 GPA, after taking 20 AP classes and getting a 5 in all of them. Good grades, good college, good job, good life. And maybe there is happiness in achievement, at least in the moment, but that is not a life. A life is mundane and imperfect, full of stumbling blocks and 25-minute bus rides and walking in the mud just so you can eat out with friends.

And a life is still beautiful, because it’s full of people you love and moments that feel like movie scenes and spaces you’ll grow into. It’s a process. The trick is to learn to love it.