Flash in a Pan

We had a conversation at dinner earlier tonight and it got me thinking about how quickly things fade in and out of our lives. Of course that particular idiom typically refers to fads and whatnot, I'm thinking of it more in terms of those periods in our lives that just come and go in a nanosecond. Tonight I'm waxing on college.

Six years ago people that I barely knew gathered after a very memorable basketball tournament trip and made a video for the Yale Precision Marching Band. And to be perfectly honest, it isn't the greatest video. The dialog, the video quality, the pyrotechnics are still hilarious, but I think they are funny because of the memories associated with them more than their lasting contribution to cinema. The video encapsulates a period of intense joy associated with the memories of a trip that is memorable because everything that could go wrong did go wrong in a way so incredulous that it was, and still is, comedic.

The most stunning thing about the video, though, is how important the people credited with the video have been in my life and how I couldn't have even begun to fathom that at that time. I barely knew Patrick, Kris, Kyle, Mickey,and Jake,or really even Lauren at that time. Lauren became my roommate my following year and a year after that married Mickey- my first really good friends to get married, and now Lauren has graduated law school and Mickey is heading toward the end of a PhD in Bioengineering. I had really only begun to know Jake and he became a great source of support and a great foe in the theology over the next few years. He knew Annie at that point and five years later they are happily married and he's in the last year of law school. Kris I never knew as well but he and Megan have some of the most beautiful wedding pictures I've ever seen. Kyle, at that time, existed only as the odd person that wore a shark suit. He too became one of the biggest sources of support for me. I love thinking that at that point Kyle and Jamie had no idea that each other existed but that the universe was moving in a way that their paths would intersect two years later. And then there is Patrick. I still think that we were the best ECs that the MOB had (I'm allowed to be biased). I didn't know at that time that his then girlfriend, now wife, Gillian would be at Rice not 6 months later and that Gillian would become one of my best friends and the person that I probably talk to the most (maybe even more than Jack).

It's just strange to think of how unknown everything was 6 years ago and as a freshman how many possibilities there were in front of me that I couldn't have imagined. So much joy existed in that time that I almost hate to remember it and somehow tarnish the memory. I know that I'm projecting my feeling backwards and at the time we probably weren't as happy as I thought and the possibilities weren't as limitless, but isn't hindsight slightly more than 20/20?

And now we're grown up. We've moved away from Rice and the band hall (or mostly so). People are scattered from Houston and the lines of communication are harder and less persistent. We all have jobs (even those in graduate school) and life is infinitely more complicated. I hate to admit, but watching that video makes me think of the Vitamin C song "Graduation" from 2000. I still get a weird, knotted feeling in my stomach when I hear that song. What do we know of the future? How do we know who we will become friends with, who we will work to maintain relationships with? I suppose that we just try to spread love in every moment and hope that that shared connection won't be a flash in the pan.