Falling asleep to the sound of a crackling fire, waves repetitively pounding the shore, the angelic white glare of the bright full moon, I fell asleep besides my two companions, my two comrades in the 4 years Berkeley Engineering War, my two friends who had elected to come camping for 2 nights at the start of our last Finals Week.

Waking up was just as majestic. The same eternal sea graced the shore at a lesser decibel as low tide was in effect. Seals barked from the jetty and Blue Jays chorused in the bushel around me.

I wash up, I organized camp, and I start my essay on the Mekong River Hydro-dam.

Why am I writing a paper along the sea shores of the Pacific Ocean? Who writes papers while camping, drinking a beer, and digging his toes into the fine grain sand?

To borrow the words of Katy Perry, it just felt so wrong and yet it felt so right.

4 years at Cal taught me to appreciate the slower, the picturesque, the beautiful things of life. Sitting by the ocean means tenfold more to me now than it did when I grew up by the body of water. Sitting on a patch of grass overlooking my university, falling asleep along the way, feels so natural to me, as compared to when I couldn’t sit still or vegetate for more than 10 minutes pre-college.

Now 5 days away from graduating, I’m finishing up my final assignment. But my mind is more engaged in the fact that I am ending college with the greatest lesson Cal taught me …. Appreciation of everything and everyone around me.

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I have since graduated (12 hours ago) and I’m overwhelmed with emotions. I can’t convey what I’m feeling as simply as thoughts materialized when I was typing away on the beach. More on this later…