As a species, we wither away under the illusion of having a self. We think and we are aware of it. We are so self-aware of the labors of our mind, too self-aware of our senses, our own cognizance. Perhaps we haven’t even the right to exist. Perhaps, like trees and stones, we exist out of chance alone.

It is utterly foolish of us not to admit the smallness of our significance in a universe that snickers at our superiority complex. Why, even the dinosaurs that commanded the earth for over 180 million years slipped sprucely out of existence (our mere 200 thousand loses luster in comparison). Perhaps then, it would even be humbling to renounce any value to what we observe and experience and drift aimlessly through life like phantoms in one vertiginous dream.

Throughout the course of my four years at Manhattan High, I drifted a lot. In between taking notes automatically and regurgitating answers, I lost sight of what I wanted, what I loved. I found my legs walking me to class after class after class and without even realizing it, I limited myself to working the system and an education that values grades above knowledge.

I burned out. I was only just getting by. And for the most part, I was okay with it because I was conducting perpetual discussions in my mind on the fateful misstep that is human consciousness and the triviality of it all and convincing myself that nothing I did or felt here mattered. I deemed my time as a high school student trifling and that’s where I went wrong.

In 100 thousand years, Aristotle, Shakespeare and Isaac Newton will vaporize out of existence. By then, no one will recall that I ever existed at all. In a couple billion years, our universe will whimper and stop. There will be nothing and no one will recall that any of us ever existed.

Where does high school teeter in the grand scheme of things?

It is evident that a lot of the relationships I manufactured during my time here will be reduced to soot by the time I turn 25 and it is irrefutable that there will come a day when I don’t remember who I went to school with let alone how derivatives and integrals work or who Henry Clay and Booker T. Washington were.

In the future, I may remember nothing of my high school days nor may I care to, but that does not make any of my present experiences meaningless.

For years, I looked to the so-called future, always the future, and that’s where I went wrong. I made light of living in this moment to make more room for the future to wear the crown when the here and now is truly everything; it’s all we ever have.

In an instant we can become enlightened, we can laugh with friends and family and feel at peace with it all. In an instant we can question impossibilities, plunge voluptuously into being. We can focus on an arm and see cottony cilia jut out like whiskers. In an instant we can recognize that beneath the skin there are tireless veins and nomadic vessels and layers of flesh and muscles and life. We can be exhausted by the vividness of our own experiences and suffocate in the beauty of the existence of trees and stones.

It took me four years to sincerely realize this, but I am thankful for my time at Manhattan High. I am thankful for the compassionate, ethereal friends I made and the teachers who inspired and inflamed me and pushed me to think for myself. I am thankful I stumbled into this school’s 21st Century Journalism class my freshman year and fell into the newspaper and yearbook staffs. But mostly, I am thankful for the moments: going on adventures with my friends and letting the wind caress our skin, seeing the smile on someone’s face when I complimented their T-shirt, choking on insuppressible laughter during newspaper work night, watching three yearbook editors dance the “Hoedown Throwdown,” welcoming a riveting disorientation spawned by the immensity of my love of literature and photography, listening to my teachers’ stories about their dogs, finding myself surrounded by people I care so much about.

As a species, we effloresce under the illusion of having a self. Though we are frequently blinded by the nothingness in an impending horizon; we see colors fused with wonder and desire, golden tresses disturbing spring rain.

In the grand scheme of the universe, our time here is trivial. But we are not the universe. We are human beings, individuals with thoughts, emotions and an incurable passion for life. And in defiance of our cynicism, we are disgustingly idealistic. A hail of empathy downs upon us like hyacinths hatching from muddied soil and though we discern that somewhere out there the world must have an end, we ache with it all. Somehow we know that just existing in this moment is a grand thing.