Timing is a weird thing. When I wrote this list of things I learned in New York City, more than one of them addressed timing. What makes something the right time? And also the tricky concept that time can seem to go much slower than we'd hope for, or too quickly for our taste, but then we look back at the end and have another warped view altogether.
It wasn't until my last day interning with CBS News this Summer that I realized the true gift of being where I was when I was. On the final day of the internship, the interns and News Associates went to one of the local bars on the corner for drinks after work. For my intern friends at CBS This Morning, it was the end of their day. For me as a CBS This Morning: Saturday intern, this was the middle of my workday and I had to head back to the Friday production meeting, so I went for just a few minutes to say hello. It was in those short minutes in that bar that I realized we had found each other in a time capsule of sorts, and that each of their short experiences with CBS News just happened to overlap with mine, before we'd head off in separate directions, maybe forever.
On another timing note, it's surprising it took me all summer to realize this. Well, of course I've realized that group of people would never combine in the exact same way again, but it was in the very last moments we shared together that I realized it was something I took for granted.
This summer flew by in my opinion, and my CBS News intern coordinator likened our 10 weeks at CBS to a 10 minute interview. "You have 7 more minutes to leave a great impression/make a memorable pitch/leave an impact," she'd say at the beginning of Week 3.
And it felt that way. Like a very quick 10 minutes.
How many times in life does a movie come up in conversation and we are collectively gobsmacked that fill-in-the-blank time has passed since it was released? Or people we run into and say a quick, "let's do coffee!" and realize a few months later nothing ever came of that, but it doesn't really feel like that long since we made that empty promise.
So now, less than 40 days away from graduation, I think about timing a lot. The people I shared only part of my UM journey with, the people I shared it all with, and just how long it's been since everything started to change when I stepped onto the University of Miami campus as a wide-eyed freshman on my 18th birthday, completely, entirely and utterly unaware of the woman I'd be when I left.