Matthew Riley ’26
The ocean is unrelenting. It never gets tired, and it does not care whether or not you do. It will pull you under without care and never spend a second thinking about it. While its waves can be relaxing when small, whooshing over a shore, most of the time, they create fear, anxiety and stress when they crash with thunderous intensity. You hope to never be under one when it crashes, but inevitably you are.
Life piles up on you quickly. Waves of work, applications, and relationships crash over you each day. Every assignment replaced by another, every issue creating another, making you unable to do anything. Frozen in a seemingly endless cycle.
Hope appears when you can look up and see in the distance an end to your chaos. Maybe not close or soon, but it always comes to an end. Making every drop of work feel meaningful. Knowing that once you are finished, you’ll miss what you once were doing. No matter how hard or treacherous it was.
Life is your own ocean. You must face your own waves. Some may bring peace, and some may cause chaos. But you manage through them. Seeing your break in the future lets you keep pushing. Unrelenting, you will make it through. You are not tired. But the ocean is.