As students leave high school, they might not feel inclined to reflect on the experience. This may be because after four years of high school English, the words ‘reflect’ and ‘reflection’ now make you feel sick to your stomach, or you’re simply too busy reminding uninterested classmates how ready you are for college. It also may seem that reflections on high school only serve a purpose to the future principals among us—those who will one day tell bored freshmen how they wished they’d participated in more clubs. So, with all that in mind, I’d like to do some reflecting on reflecting.
Looking in the rearview mirror at the past four years, a few things stick out to me. In particular, I’m struck by the great changes we’ve all undergone. These changes came not only in the departments of personal hygiene and respect towards our substitute teach-ers, but in our appreciation for each other, our comradery, and our ever-growing list of finely-tuned skills and unique achievements. I can recall countless moments when classmates’ accomplishments have inspired me to take a moment to pause and reflect. Moments when robotics tournaments were won, and I thought about how I wished I’d joined the team or when the best essays in class read more like a novel by Dickens than a high schooler’s paper, and I wished I’d made a better effort on my own poorly punctuated essay. Yet for me, these moments of reflection were idle and fleeting. I never joined the new club, or wrote the essay worthy of literary admiration. I simply wished that I had, and thought that I should.
While writing this, I have finally realized that the act of simple reflection does one no good. None of us stray from our well-beaten paths because we casually think we should. And so, as we leave high school and go off to be surrounded by a new batch of interesting and motivated people, don’t bother reflecting. Don’t waste your peers’ nudges towards personal growth on internal “shouldacouldawouldas.” Just join that club, write that paper, try that sport. Do now, reflect later.
