Post-college what?

A few days ago, I received an email from the Duke Office of Information & Technology that my school ID and everything associated with it would be deactivated on Feb. 24th. 

My heart sank.

They were telling us, move on! Let go! Go out into the world now and become an adult! And the way we're going to teach you how to do that is to now just cut you off...and give you a lame alumni.duke.edu replacement email. But no replacement ID. Now all you have left to do is give lots of money (even more than the $160,000 tuition everyone already had to pay) to help pay for unnecessarily extravagant 50 inch plasma tvs and $3000 spanish benches all over our campus. 

I guess it had to happen sometime. I couldn't always remain under the comforts of a Duke name. 

It was, in fact, too comfortable at times. It was a world of opportunity and unlimited dreaming, where money seemed to flow where the mouth moved, where the ideas lay, where the passion lived. But it was also a place of privilege, pride, and ignorance, where even altruism was driven by self-importance and the desire to succeed.

There was a certain vanity, though, that the name of Duke fed and nurtured. Especially here in Korea, where the names you wear and the people you know are unfortunately the only things that matter. Though I try to suppress and deny it, it fed my ego to see the expression on people's faces, filled with a mixture of want and approval, when I told them where I went to school. It was an automatic ticket into an exclusive world, which, as much as I hated, pulled at me like a nagging child.

But when faced with the truth, you realize that Duke and its glorious prestige is fake. It doesn't really matter. And those to whom it matters to don't really matter.

The billions of dollars and power associated with that name will not help you find happiness, or meaning, or allow you to understand the suffering of those around you in this complicated weave of human connections called life. 

And so I'm happy it's letting me go. It hurts my pride and my vanity a bit, but those need to die anyway. 

It's time to live by another creed.

To taste the rigors and tears and laughs of what this life offers without being covered by a blanket of complacency and undesevered optimism. To overcome our fears of disapproval, rejection, uncertainty, pain, and death. To understand what it means to suffer, and to love, and to find freedom in those unabashed expressions of human interactions. To find joy in serene silence as well as chaotic noise. And to accept, but to hope, in all circumstances, with a grateful heart. 

To not be complacent. And to not forget the cries of those around you.

They don't teach you these things in the college classroom. It's what you learn in the smiling face of a child who has been diagnosed with a terminal illness, in the wrinkled hands of your working parents, in the passionate words of a musing academic,  in the broken yet hopeful cries of a war torn society, in your dreams, in your imagination, and in those deep dark corners of your life waiting to shine.