Da Capo

The beginning of the end has begun. An exciting “end” that is. Last week I started my final year of undergraduate studies and while very cliché, I can’t help but say that time flies. I remember the very day I made the drive to San Diego. Car packed, heart pounding and student debt pending, all I wanted to do was get there. All that stood between me and PLNU was the traffic jammed 5 freeway.

I remember unloading the car, I remember staring at blank white walls and staring at the ocean out the window. I remember wanting to get the unpacking and paperwork over. I remember the hot weather, the maxi dress I wore and the first time I met my roommate. I remember buying a ridiculous amount of food and top ramen at Target. I remember the painful goodbye to my parents and being shocked by my own reaction. All I had wanted to do was get to San Diego and suddenly all I wanted was for my parents to take me back home with them.

Moving wasn’t anything new to me. There’s nothing much left to shock a girl who has lived in 2 different countries, 3 states and 6 cities. I get the process and adjustment thing. What was different this time around was that I was staying put, in a foreign place with strange people, with lots of expensive books and time consuming assignments and my family couldn’t be there and I have to pay a whole bunch of money for a 8.5 by 11 piece of paper. While I have always been an independent, full time school, full time employee, there was something different about this independence. It wasn’t about location or distance; it was the beginning of a transition.

Skipping forward a few years, its surreal to think that in just 8 months, I go from current student to former student and I am really excited. Like everyone says, it’s a bittersweet feeling. Bitter to leave the people and memories, but sweet to enter a new phase or perhaps da capo? 

Since I once studied piano, violin, and voice when I was younger and my dad is professional opera singer, musical terms are forever embedded in my vocabulary. 

Da Capo essentially means “back to the beginning to repeat.” In sheet music, da capo will signal its reader to repeat a previous section. In opera, a da capo aria repeats the same section of music but the singer is expected to add variations and ornaments. The basic tune is still there, but the section is more interesting and exciting the second time around. Life da capo then is experiencing something which is completely different and yet completely the same. Just as arias go through stages and transitions, so am I. I know what the future will look like, but I also know it will be completely different in its own unique way. 

Have you ever felt after a peak experience that everything in your life is completely different and yet it’s completely the same? TS Elliot sums it up perfectly: “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all of our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

a little transformation tuesday. my roommate turned best friend turned sister. we grew up a little, i think. 

Then (2010)

Now