The commencement was addressed by the college President who started his speech by quoting Socrates’ famous phrase: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” He hoped that his students too got a chance to examine their lives and know themselves during their years in the institution. I was already enthralled by his speech because being a student of Literature and Philosophy, I had constantly questioned and struggled to know myself ever since the freshman year, when in my ‘Introduction to Philosophy’ class, I came across Plato’s Apology for the first time. And there I was, listening to the President repeat the same wise words, which marked the beginning of my philosophical quest, on my last day as an undergraduate student. “Do you know yourselves better today than you did when you first arrived here?” Did I really know myself better on the day I was graduating than I did when I first arrived on this beautiful campus on top of a hill in New Hampshire, thousands of miles away from home? Did I? I knew what my answer was. And I felt joy realising that I had possibly learnt one of the most important teachings one must learn in life. To know oneself better, after all, is one of the major reasons behind human existence itself.

A day before commencement, my English professor had given me a card with a portrait of Walt Whitman. Knowing about my love for the poet’s works, he quoted his favorite lines from Song of Myself, thinking it perfectly fit for the next step in my journey. Through Whitman, he was telling me:

You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor

look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the

spectres in books. You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things

from me,

You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself.

I read those lines over and over again that night like I had done countless times before when I was assigned to read the poem for the American Literature class. I was being asked to not let all the things I had learnt to simply sink-in. I was being urged instead, to question what I was being told and only believe the ones that I held true to myself. Until I went to college, no teacher had ever asked me to learn this way - through my own lens and not just by learning through someone else’s thinking. My education prior to college (in Nepal) was all about writing exactly what I was being told by my teachers. Being creative was not really something that was prioritised, I simply had to believe in what I was being taught. Asking too many questions or questioning the teacher’s thinking easily resulted in being labelled a ‘disrespectful student’ and getting bad grades in exams. “Perhaps, none of my school teachers had ever read Whitman, or realised the importance of introspection,” I thought.

“Four years of college were the golden years of your life,” my father said a few weeks back, just as I came home after travelling throughout America for about two months. I smiled and agreed to what he said, because college life was indeed a very special time for me. They were not my ‘golden years,’ as he put it, just because it was a new experience, but more so because it kindled an awakening within myself. As I sit back now and think about what I have learnt through college, I do think about many classes and the books that I read and what they taught me, but most importantly, I realised that I discovered myself while in college. The most precious gift those four years gave me was the chance to explore myself.

In one of my favorite Emily Dickinson poems, she famously writes, “the brain is wider than the sky.” Only through constant questioning and curiosity can we realise the immensity of human mind that Dickinson tries to explain in her work. To be able to fully understand and appreciate the world and ourselves, one must constantly practice questioning and not hesitate to be inquisitive. I can proudly state, for the first time in my life, that the last four years of my education has indeed urged me to seek this depth. Much as I hate admitting it, I do not think it would have been the same had I stayed back for my college education.

Three months have passed since graduation, and as I sit in the room that I grew up in, I realise the changes I have gone through. I left home not knowing who I actually was, and then came back finally getting to know myself better. The Whitman card that I brought back with me sits on my study desk, and the gaze on the poet’s face seems to question me every day if I am indeed living an examined life. I have Whitman who constantly stirs this question in me on a daily basis and I believe this makes my existence more meaningful. At the same time, I wonder how many actually practise this. Perhaps, the question we all should ask ourselves once in a while, if not every day is: “Am I living an examined life?”

Bhatta is a recent graduate from Colby-Sawyer College, New Hampshire