As we look back on these last four years, I feel like there are two common responses to our looming graduation: regret and gratitude. Some of us may regret not working harder to get that B+ to an A-, and some of us may regret working too hard. (Books aren’t substitutes for friends.) Some of us may regret not getting involved in as many clubs (or with as many people), or the other way around (on both counts). Either way, nobody’s perfect and there are plenty of mistakes that both I and you have made along our way to graduating.

But the important thing is that we are graduating with the rest of our lives ahead of us. Now, while I’ve started this column on a depressing note (regrets, really?), I do so to make a point that regretting our past is a perfectly natural way for us to feel, especially when college, the “time of our lives”, is nearing its end. After all, who knows what will happen next?

People go their separate ways and before you know it, it will be our 10-year reunion and we’ll be feeling like those awkward Whitman alumni do when they see a version of their 20-year-old self frolicking on Ankeny, Frisbee in hand. Now, I don’t want to overly romanticize these last four years. There have been plenty of tough times in our academic and personal lives. But what I do want to suggest is that the best way for us to commemorate these last four years at Whitman, if we choose to, is not to dwell on them over and over again, striving in the remaining week or so to “undo” or “redo” what we had left undone or perhaps overdone.

The reason for this is that we can’t change what we did or did not do. I mean, inherent in the act of doing is the closing of all other possibilities. Yet what can we do in these next few days to commemorate, make meaningful, preserve or respect our college experience? Party? Well, obviously. But what about feeling grateful for what we’ve been through the last four years?

Now, gratitude is something we aren’t used to feeling these days. Often times, there is a mentality of “I want it and I want it NOW” that reeks of desperation and immaturity. Instead, feeling grateful for some fact, that we have graduated from a great liberal arts college without losing our sanity or our souls, for example, entails a kind of gladness : or perhaps “contentment” is the better word here. After all, we all could just as easily have gone to another college. We all could just as easily have been born a few months later in the year and currently be juniors. These are all possibilities that are equally as likely as the present reality in the grand scheme of things.

But they forever remain possibilities because, well, reality is now. It is the sea of familiar faces that we see everyday. It is the frantic spamming of student listservs in order to sell our furniture. It is the incessant and impending drumbeat of age where our parents cut us off financially (if they haven’t done so already). And wow, that’s scary.

But it is also awesome. Despite all the other possible ways our college experience could have turned out, it turned out this way with its highs and lows. We have spent four years with some great friends, laughing, crying and hugging each other every August when we see each other as if for the first time. We have endured countless nights in the library wishing to go to sleep but willing our fingers to continue typing.

Aside from being grateful for the preceding facts, what about being grateful for the preceding people? Our friends. Friendship, like almost no other object that makes us happy (the tube, computer, a great meal, etc.), seems to be the condition for all those objects to attain their worth in the first place. That is, it is only through sharing our time together by doing things like watching TV or just hanging out on a porch watching the cars go by that the TV and the dirty porch attain their fullest values. And I’m sure we can all appreciate the whole confluence of circumstances that had to fall into place for us to be friends with those whom we are friends with. Residence hall assignments. Core class. Chance meetings in some dingy basement to the tune of Daft Punk.

And that’s the point I want to drive home in this space. A whole series of improbable circumstances paradoxically had to fall into place for us to have the things that we cherish. Equally likely, however, is that a whole series of improbable circumstances also fell into place for the bad things that befell us to occur. It is our choice whether or not we regretfully and perhaps resentfully try to undo the second set of improbable circumstances, or gladly feel humbled by having the good fortune to have the chips fall where they have.