Crossing The Stage
Author: Patti Cobian Issue: 2024-05-15
Crossing The Stage
by Patti Cobian
After years of study in a world built atop static frameworks and models, it feels like I’m at graduation again; walking across another stage, squinting into the bright May sun, the wind tossing all of my best-dressed efforts and accoutrements into the air with absolutely no regard, because it’s the wind, and the wind's job was never to regard.
Today, I admit, I find myself surprised to be here. The course of learning I have been undertaking — my last decade of study — had no title or formality to mark its passage; no announcement, no speech, and certainly no diploma. But something about the feeling of this moment echoes that sunny day, where we all sat on folding chairs, sweating through the armpits of our Sunday-best, watching kid after kid walk across a stage, diploma in held tightly in one hand, empty promises of the establishment in the other.
As we crossed that stage, we were symbolically leaving behind the stability of what was Known to step forward into the real and rumbling world. They had told us for years that what we were learning would help us in that “real world”, that those* *were the skills needed to get by, to succeed, to thrive.
Maintaining a firm grasp on those empty words felt like holding on to fistfuls of dried spaghetti, snapping to bits whenever I would clench too tightly, pieces skittering over the tile of my young adulthood. I never even tried to pick up them up; I just kept going.
We know what happens next: kids everywhere advance into the real world with diplomas and handfuls of spaghetti. Some kids make it to the next graduation stage; some even have spaghetti left over. Some get by, some succeed, and the ones that thrive build their lives upon the shinier surfaces of society. Some self-destruct.
And then, there are the others: kids armed with spaghetti who get thrown cinderblocks, and have no choice but to find something else to hold onto. Some find hands; others just find holes.
What occurred to me today was that the post-graduation initiation doesn’t really ever end. Over a lifetime, we are handed new fistfuls of things that fill the void of Known; we find comfort in their defined edges, how heavy and solid and real they feel in our palms. We squeeze them for solace when we clench. We get thrown cinderblocks. The Known crumbles in our hand, and we find new Knowns.
Sometimes, in those blessed, cinderblock-free years, we clench until the comfort of the rigid edges of Known turns into an ache, and that ache, the cage that insulates us from the next step, the next solution, the next emergent invitation into the very next-ness of Life, individually and collectively.
Some spend everything trying to ignore the ache.
As long as our frameworks and systems are static, humankind will inexorably flatten the dynamic, flog the living, and anesthetize the emergent processes that propel life forward, so that they might be shoved head-first into static frameworks and systems.
I fear that – as long as we proceed in this way – we will continue to be shown that the Living cannot be contained within the tidy confines of Known and Accounted For, Quantified and Static.
The Living will never stop bursting through our attempts to contain it, the way tree roots buckle massive slabs of concrete, compromising cautiously-planned foundations. The Living will continue to flummox the scientists that walked across the most prestigious stages, and all the while, kids and families, communities and countries will fall between the cracks of their ignorance. And still, in our hubris and our fear, we will try to contain.
Today, the stage I cross feels like it may not be one of establishment, but of paradigm. This time, I’ll graduate, and what I hold in my hand is the paradox of our time: eternal, fixed, ever-changing, immutable — the certainty of the Unknown.
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- Patti Cobian (author)
- 2024 (year)
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