When you are a senior, things change---or are about to---and often in big ways, though we do not always know this at the time.
Senior year in high school two things happened that would change me in ways I am still realizing.
First, I was moved without being asked into a drama class. This was not comfortable. I now see such discomfort as a sign of greatest potential for growth. When we are comfortable we settle in; when we are uncomfortable we sit up, pay attention, are alert, on guard. From this class came confidence, a voice, a self I had never known before.
Second, I agreed to go to Europe on a trip with dozens of others at the end of senior year. Throughout the year, we had to meet with Chuck Gebhardt, our guide, whose job was to prepare us for the trip and provide some educational foundation to the experience. In that group was a girl named Susan (to my immediate right in the photograph taken in Spain) who would first become my friend, then later my dear friend, and eventually my passionate correspondent and, finally, my wife.
Ann is taking a class now, one for seniors which she attends several days a week, which it seems she would perhaps rather not go to but from which she so clearly benefits. It challenges her. Gets her into the world.
Isn't that really the essence of these senior moments: they are what the author Joseph Conrad called "shadowlines," spaces into which we go as we are and come out as we need to be to meet the demands of the world or at least the next moment.
So it is with Whitman and college, the coach he's working with, and the others in his life gathered to help him prepare for the changes ahead...and within.
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