Graduating from college was anti-climactic. While graduation signified an enormous turning point in my life, most students know that the day itself comes a few weeks late. I remember countless late-nights in the lab thinking “just make it through April.” On May 1st, I’d be finished with finals, my thesis would be written and defended, and I’d have scribbled down my last lecture notes.

Thus, my graduation in late-May came and went without the same feeling of exaltation that came with walking out of my chemistry exam, the last academic obligation of my undergraduate career. Still, for most people, graduation was the real point at which college was “over.” It was a transitional moment, the end of an era, whatever cliché you want to use. The long four (or more) years of life, your college years, were officially something worthy of reminiscence. The college phase was in the past.

But for me, I wouldn’t achieve that sense of closure for another week.  At graduation, I sat and wiggled my toes and bounced my legs, thinking about the last race I would run that season in eight days. For a runner, the mentality of training and racing can become so intertwined with your daily life that it’s hard to recognize big phase-changes outside of the running season. As I sat in my silly black gown on the president’s lawn, I knew that I couldn’t yet cut my ties with Tufts, couldn’t breathe the long sigh of relief that comes with  the completion of a long and arduous task.  I had started this block of running as a Tufts athlete – some six months earlier – and I’d still think of myself as a Tufts athlete until I ran my last steps of the season.

I ran those last steps at 8:07am the following Sunday, as I crossed the line at Boston’s Run to Remember Half Marathon. With those steps, my academic responsibility, team responsibility, and personal responsibility that I’d felt associated with my senior spring were finally over. For the first time, I exhaled all of  the obligations I’d labored over for the past six months of the season, the past four years of college, and the past seventeen years of education. This was my graduation; this was the end of my college career; this was the beginning of my break.

 

Five months later, I find myself approaching a similar moment of transition. A month from now, I’ll be in the Lima airport, having my traditional Peruvian Big Mac (the Lima airport remains the only place I’ve ever eaten a Big Mac and has now become something of a tradition; thanks to the STRIVErs for that one…), and waiting to my board a flight back to the US.

And so, I find myself at the beginning of the end. Living in Quito has been fantastic. I love my job; I love my friends; I love the city and the mountains and the weather and the language. But I know that when I return from the US in early December to be greeted by another greasy Peruvian hamburger, I’ll be starting a new phase. I’ll be working in a new job, in a new place, and training for a new distance. And while transitions can be intimidating, in all phase changes there remain elements of familiarity. It won’t be the same job, but I’ll likely be working with some familiar people. I won’t be in the same city, but the culture and landscapes should similar.  I won’t be training for the same race distance, but some elements of this new training will be the same that I’ve practiced for years.

Every phase change arrives with some uncertainty. Some (moving to a new continent) more than others (the start of a new semester). But I have a month.  A month of joyous and climatic races and tearful and nostalgic goodbyes. This isn’t the end just now, though, only the beginning of it.

But that phrase – the beginning of the end – comes with an (unjustified) negative connotation. Even in those seemingly terminal moments – the graduations, the finish-lines, the adios‘s – never are truly final. I’ll never be an undergraduate again, just as I’ll never go back to middle-school, but the progression of my life is evolutionary, with the most meaningful elements surviving from one phase to be inherited by the next. Though my life may change, I keep the places and people and ideas I really love with me forever; I know I never truly have to say goodbye. Instead, I say see you next time – hasta luego.