Volume CXXXII, Number 4 October 4, 2002 f

Performing an endless dress rehearsal
LARA JACOBS
STAFF WRITER

We spend much of life preparing for what's still to come. Childhood, especially, is all about what's next-be it solid foods, third grade, or applying for college. Growing up as an "old soul", I often had more in common with Austen's Lizzy, Bronte's Charlotte or Alcott's Jo than my fellow ninth graders, instilling in me a tendency to look ahead; because, to be honest, I wasn't really enamored with the here and now. My focus was always on the future--middle school, high school and finally college, always conscious of the next peak to climb rather than the view from where I was. After four years of high school prep, of SATs, of French and of physics, Bowdoin was supposed to be the moment when the curtain would finally rise on the show of my life-the perpetual dress-rehearsal would finally cease. After the first week however, I began receiving emails from the Career Planning Center and pamphlets in my mailbox about studying abroad which all seemed suspiciously similar to my previous years of rehearsal for something in the distance, not the performance of my first act. Suddenly college didn't feel like the destination I thought it would be looking ahead all of those years, but rather like one more stop along the way, not THE moment but one of many-as the movie Amelie reminds us, life is but a dress-rehearsal for a show that will never play, and I realized for the first time that like Gatsby, my green light of remaining fixed in the present moment will remain just out of my reach. Life is about change, evolution, perpetual motion-there will always be a next act, graduate school, a PhD program, a first job, a promotion, a family, and so on. However it's the history class we take for the internship, the early morning runs training for the marathon, the five drafts of the short story rather than the final products that determine how we spend each moment, and ultimately how we live our lives. We are the stars, directors, producers, and writers of our own dress-rehearsals-if we live life well we never complete the rehearsal, we never make it to the show, because we are constantly altering the script-evolving emotionally, adding and subtracting characters, changing the scenery, and ultimately discovering ourselves. In the end there is no final product, no culminating performance of the drama known as life. We are not static beings and as a result the here and now is but one more act of the dress-rehearsal, one more moment not "the moment", one more chance to live, just not our first or last.

So if while walking across the crisp leaves beginning to fall on the quad this October and reminiscing about summer, last year or even yesterday, you feel like you're not yet where you thought you'd be, that your curtain still hasn't risen, shift your focus to the present and remember that where you are now, the dress-rehearsal, just might be the performance of a lifetime.