There are a lot of young folks that are in their first year
of college right now. And more that are in the workforce. Maybe in the
military. A lot of those were high school athletes that, for whatever reason,
are no longer playing their sport.
Maybe it was a choice. Maybe they wanted to focus on their future
without the time demands of athletics. High school is all about the experience
and developing a foundation upon which to move forward in a career.
A lot about high school is learning how to learn. To this
day, I have no idea what the value was for diagramming sentences, and I’m
pretty sure the Latin I had to take was of no practical value. But by having to
learn something that didn’t interest me (in full disclosure, nothing interested
me in high school but girls and football), I learned how to learn.
Then when I get to English Literature class in college, I
could still manage an A, even though I didn’t think it was worth anything to
me. I had learned how to learn from having to learn something that held no
interest for me. That lesson has followed me to this day.
Jump ahead a bunch of decades and here I am writing a weekly
newspaper column for the 40th year and quoting Browning’s
“Grammarian’s Funeral” in front of college students. I’ve come a long way.
I had hoped to continue playing football in college but lack
of talent and opportunity made that difficult. Oh, I had a brief stint with
Mars Hill in North Carolina but that didn’t work out.
For me, and for so many others, giving up a sport that I
loved was hard. Being a football player was a whole lot of who I was. The first
year of college didn’t really change that. Intramural sports were OK but it
wasn’t the same.
I had ended up at UT-Knoxville, majoring in wildlife
biology. Then I injured my knee, had surgery, met my first physical therapist,
and…well…that’s a story for another day. I ended up switching majors to prepare
for physical therapy school.
And here’s where the story really starts. I finally had a
real purpose in life, a career to pursue. My academic performance soared. The
friends from my hometown fell away and I made new friends, different friends,
many of which I am still friends with.
Being finally and fully immersed in the college experience,
I discovered that there was a wide world out there. And I discovered a lot
about who I really was.
I discovered art and literature and music. I met people very
different from me. I discovered cultures very different from my own and
realized that they had value too. I learned that a lot of what we thought we
knew was just our opinion, and that others might have a different opinion. And
that was OK. I figured out that I did have a brain and how to use it.
I asked a college freshman just last weekend what she found
so great about college. She has really enjoyed her first few months. Her
answer? “Anonymity.” I like that.
Some have said that college can be an opportunity to
re-invent yourself. I don’t think it’s
so much that as it is that you can become the person that you were intended to
be.
No longer bound by expectations, no longer living the life
presumed for you by others, no longer limited by the perceptions of others, you
are free to be you. It definitely happened to me.
And as you enter this incredibly important transition from
teenager to adult, whether it is going to college or entering the workforce,
you control your destiny.
So, what do you want to do with your life? Or, more
importantly, WHO do you want to be?
