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I graduated a few days back, I guess. In Saskatoon, it was convocation, and my graduate degree was formally bestowed upon me, although I was not there to receive it. Thanks to the mail and the transitive properties of degrees, though, I'll still be getting that piece of paper eventually, and I have the dubious privilege of saying that I hold a master's. And now I have the similarly dubious privilege of saying "What next?"

I got an email from my department on the occasion of my graduation containing that old chestnut that's ostensibly from Thoreau: "Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined." I recently re-read 'Walden' and in their original place I can milk some meaning from those words, but denuded of context, as they so frequently are, those two sentences become the sort of meaningless platitude that's difficult to do much with. By contrast, here's the actual quote:

"I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them."

If, Thoreau wrote, and that makes such a difference. It's not a command or an imperative, just a possibility, an option. But it's a possibility with the radical potential to carry a person across borders into fresh country.

So I don't know what's next. I'm weighing possibilities, or perhaps more rightly, I'm weighing dreams: one against the other, this against that. Nothing is ever as simple as a platitude, and most people can't live in air castles. For now, though, I'm comfortable living in this liminal place while I sort myself out. It's not tenable indefinitely, but it'll do in the interim.