I've been here before, and I'll be here again

I have now spent 13 years in various layers of "higher education".  That's not quite half of my life, but it's close.  During that length of time I have learned a lot of things, but I've realized there's only one lesson that holds throughout all of it.  I thought when I graduated in Electrical Engineering that uniform lesson would be the ability to find a reference book.  That's right.  As an engineer there is no such thing as memorization (minus a few basic rules like V=IR).  However, when I started training as a scientist, memorization became important.  Many small epiphanies have been recognition of something I had seen before and most of my work is made easier by remembering, roughly (hey, I'm not a real biologist, I'm playing the middle ground), the structure of an amino acid or the short name for a protein.  So the ability to seek out information in a favorite textbook was not the tried and true lesson from these years.

No, the tried and true lesson is that deadlines happen, and every time we rise to meet them.  I realized life feels like an ocean of events.  Every time I know there is an event on the horizon, but far out there in time, I feel like a small person on a small beach looking out into a calm, blue sea.  Way out beyond the horizon is a wave forming, I know it's there, but I can't feel it, see it or touch it.  Then as it gets closer I can start to see the undulation of the formerly calm water.  Finally, when it's so close I can fear it, there it is a wall of water, churning below and breaking above.  Rarely has this vision been so apparent to me as it is in graduate school.  About a year ago, I knew that about right now, I would be wrapping up my Ph.D.  Which, come to think of it, accounts for roughly half of those 13 years.. At that time it seemed like a nice idea, and not too hard.  Then in September, I started to see the rocking of a buoy on the ocean.  Right now, this very instant, I am feeling the sand sucked out from under my feet. 

Mostly, this post is about personal realization and mental reinforcement.  Despite how I feel now, I have to keep in mind that there hasn't been a final exam, a project, or a thesis that I haven't been ready for.  It always gets done, because that's how humans work.  Goals and deadlines are a way to help us appreciate the calm seas after the storm. 

Deep breath...it might be awhile before I can come up from this next wave.