Today is graduation day. The campus is full of students and their parents coming and going. Every year, when the lotuses bloom, it is also the season of the college entrance exams—a farewell to the years of high school. Now the lotuses on Qizhen Lake are blooming again, and another class of undergraduate and graduate students is leaving. Beneath lights bright as stars, they greet the sunrise, then turn towards the wide world.
When I graduated last year, I did not feel it quite so deeply. I was still here in Qiushi Garden: no sooner had I graduated than I enrolled again. But the people who filled my undergraduate memories were like dandelions on a mountainside, swept up by a gust of wind and set down gently on unfamiliar continents.
I watch today's graduates—those who arrived before me and those who came after—toss their mortarboards into the sky. From this moment on, they are out among the crowds, each setting off on the long road ahead. Suddenly I remember my first summer at Zhejiang University, a few years ago. The cicadas were deafening, and the sunlight made everything so sharply clear that I could almost believe time would stay there forever.
But time moves on. Like the lotuses in this lake, which bloom and fade year after year, while the people who come to see them change, one group after another. The ordinary things I once thought would last forever—the moon above me as I left the laboratory late at night, the fitness tests I could never book, the Zheda Tiyi sports-and-arts app crashing when I tried to check in—were all borrowed time. When it was due, it had to be given back.
A breeze crosses the lake, carrying the scent of lotus flowers. And suddenly I understand: graduation is simply finding another way to keep growing.