Nostalgia

One day, you’ll hear the school bell for the last time. You’ll pack up your favourite pastel highlighters, find your pen lid (which has somehow ended up under a stampede of teenagers’ feet, rushing for the bus), pack up your rucksack and zip that zip for the final time. You’ll walk out of school, past those gates, past the people you once knew so well, and never look back. 

A chapter closed, a new adventure to be embarked upon. And some day, you’ll reminisce on the ‘good old days’. A warm, fuzzy feeling will encapsulate you, like a hug from a warm blanket. Like rediscovering your old favourite song. Like rereading a childhood favourite book. And as you flip through the pages of your school yearbook when you’re 35, you’ll remember all those times from the good old days. Every time you ran laughing in the rain with your friends to your next lesson, every time you lost your locker key straight after putting all your books in, every time you made a friend for life. Enough memories to fill a thousand scrapbook pages. But when you’re living it, it’s just life. 

I've been at secondary school for 5 years, almost. And in just over a month, I take my final steps out of the gates that have become so familiar to me. Some of my most cherished memories have been created in the buildings that will stand behind me as I leave, forever held in my past. And when I'm 35, flipping the pages of my dusty '2023 Leavers' yearbook, reliving the moments that shaped me, my school will be just a snowglobe in my past, waiting to be shaken and remembered, each strand of snow a memory made. 

I suppose, all I’m trying to say is to not take these days for granted. It’s easy to get lost in the future, when surrounded by questions such as 'what happens next?', and our inquisitions of 'when is XYZ going to happen?'. However, I’m encouraging you to take a moment, look around, and appreciate the now - before you hear the ringing of the bell for the last time, before you pack up those highlighters and find that somehow elusive pen lid, before you walk out of the school gates for the final time. 

As Andy Bernard (The Office) once said, ‘I wish there was a way to know you’re in the good old days before you’ve actually left them’.