I’m exhausted. My body aches, my brain too, and I feel like I could sleep for a week, but when I do go to bed, I wake up five hours later with a racing heart and a to-do list spooling through my head. Why? I am near the finishing line of my degree, a BA in fine art (painting).
It’s been a marathon and this is the final sprint. My assessment starts today, then, in two weeks, we have our graduate exhibition when the public is invited in to admire our work and maybe even purchase a piece, or to point and sneer and say clever things like “This is what I pay taxes for?” Yes, yes, I hear you: imagine how tired I’d be if I were actually studying something important to humanity, like engineering. Or nuclear physics. Or accounting. I mean, creativity? Ridiculous.
Nonetheless, here I am, exhausted by art. But I’m also exhilarated. I suspect I will remember this year – when I went into third-level education full-time at the age of 54 – as one of the happiest of my adult life.
It’s been tough, frustrating, confusing and many was the dark night I wondered what I was doing, if I had the chops for it, who the hell I thought I was, but that’s the funny thing about pivotal instances of happiness: you don’t necessarily realise they’re happening until you look back and go, aaahhh, yes, there it was; that was me full up, fulfilled.
I think back over my life now and I know I only grasped an occasion’s importance when it was over. The songs I hear today and remember listening to on a road trip with my sons, the card games with my dad, when we made our fingers into little dogs pretending to peek at each other’s cards. The time I sat on the grass with my grandson in my lap, watching a peacock together in perfect silence; my mom on a walk when I was a child, throwing her arms out and declaring: “Look at that! Isn’t the world beautiful?” It was. It still is.
Memories are made when we’re lost in the moment. And now to this warm store I will add not graduating, but instead simply being in my assigned nook at university, painting away to a soundtrack of my classmates’ conversation and laughter.
