It’s been almost a year since I—despite being explicitly warned—threw my cap and tassle into the air at graduation. Considering that I finished my last exam five months ago, many have asked, with an indirect amount of forwardness, what exactly am I doing here. “I’m a writer for our alumni magazine,” I reply, a perfunctory response that serves to quell their curiosity. Most are content with this answer and don’t venture to guess what it is I actually write.

One of the main components of my job at the magazine has been writing obituaries. And after five months of condensing entire lives into three sentences, I’ve come to two conclusions: One, that it’s impossible, and two, that I am going to die someday. But despite questioning my own mortality at the age of 23, I’ve also become intimately tied to lives I once believed to be distant. I have written the stories of former undergrads much like myself, who found love in an unlikely corner of campus, who cheered fanatically at Memorial Stadium, and who insisted that their time at UC Berkeley was the best of their lives.

I’ve been coming to terms with this last thought for sometime. As I picked up my diploma yesterday, it occurred to me: If college is, as they say, the best time of your life, then what happens next?

Plagued by this question, I went running to clear my head. As the sun began to set over the bay, and the steady stroll of fog was coming in from the east, I was greeted with this inspiring vista over downtown Berkeley. As I passed exam-stressed undergraduates armed with coffee, I became overwhelmed with nostalgia, realizing that my gamut of emotions is now forever attached to anecdotes, still-frames of people and places who’ve made me who I am.

I finally stopped underneath the Campanile, greeted by the last reflection of sunlight underneath the Golden Gate. Relishing the appropriate metaphor, I was reminded of a part from Way of the Peaceful Warrior, where UC Berkeley student Dan Millman, after hours of deep meditation, returns to his spiritual guru, Socrates, and reveals his progress by proclaiming one simple statement: “There are no ordinary moments!”

My anxieties eventually dissipated when I realized that college is not a tangible place, but a state of mind. It’s the acknowledgment that our educations are everlasting, transcending any classroom or campus. Our intellectual journey is predicated on the idea that we leave UC Berkeley with more questions than answers and, despite this uncertainty, we embrace the future with open arms. As Socrates explained to young Dan Millman, “Life requires more than knowledge; it requires intense feeling and constant energy. Life demands right action if knowledge is to come alive.”

If there’s one constant theme to my columns, it’s that we as human beings are not so different, and together we have the potential to do extraordinary things. Our world is filled with such beauty and wonder—and it’s also bursting with injustice and hatred. Our post-college struggle, therefore, is to maintain our youthful exuberance, fueled by our memories of Cal, amidst a sea of cynics. These people scoff at the notion of “saving the world”, peddling their pessimism as reality. I say this world needs saving, and it’ll take all the help it can get.

Is it too brazen to believe that one person can make a difference? So say the skeptics who diminish our optimism as “youthful idealism”. To them I ask, what’s wrong with idealism? Idealism is the fuel that has enabled human beings to achieve the impossible. Recalling the spirit of Gandhi and Mario Savio, I say go forward, join the campaign trail, leave for your medical mission, write a book. It doesn’t matter what you do; what matters is that you awaken your dormant knowledge through action, and you do it for the right reasons.

As for me, I’m moving to New York, an admittedly cliche place for people my age to discover themselves. I’ve decided to forego law school; instead I am preparing to teach history in the inner city. I’ve learned that my future isn’t constructed with concrete steps, bur rather amorphous ideals. My obituary has yet to be written, and knowing what I know now, I can’t promise that it will reveal how I saved the world. Three sentences will never be enough, but at this point I’d be content with a quotation from Walt Whitman: I am a man who wishes only to contribute a verse to the great play of life.

(This is my final weekly column for the Daily Californian. You can also read it here)