[font="times new roman"]Everyday change walks behind me, ready to pop out in front of me, walk beside me, trip me up, push me forward, or hold me back. High school is the epitome of change, each and every adolescent riding an emotional rip current, fighting to maintain presence above the salty surface. Beneath the brackish portal lay mental challenges, physical problems, intimacy, drugs, and alcohol. Now when multiplied by fifteen hundred, or the number of students in a high school, the permutations of change are enough to make Albert Einstein do something foolish on prom night. [/font]
[font="times new roman"] Not only does the teenage population struggle with the many forms and shapes of change itself, we struggle with how to deal with change. The most prevalent example of uncertainty when coping with alteration is college. My experience in the matter of leaving for college is a little over two-hundred days away; however, I did have the experience of saying goodbye to some very close members of the class of 2006. My relationships with people leaving for college faced a cascade of problems. They were preparing to embark on an epic voyage and I was growing and changing as a person. Yet I still struggled with how to maintain friendship with these people I had known, whom I had grown around, shared memories, and whom I thought would be forever close. [/font]
[font="times new roman"] Change was crashing upon my life; it was the tangled fishing line, and the low tide. I was struggling to cope with it, adapt to it, and most importantly accept it. Each and every day I would plan ahead, losing focus on the present. People I cared for, friends that I loved were leaving. I spent time thinking about how to keep relationships alive, how to continue the current path of friendship. As the waves of Neptune slowly devoured my safe-haven of friends, I suddenly realized how I must adapt to change.[/font]
[font="times new roman"] Watching a sunrise on the beach, I walked down to the ocean’s edge, and let the waves of change wash over me. Days, and nights I had spent, pondering the solution to change. Lying there in the ocean I realized the answer lay neither in day nor night, but in dawn. Each day is rebirth though old changes remain, therefore change is dawn: it’s beautiful, it’s ironic, and it’s magnificent.[/font]