Graduation thoughts

Went to the boyfriend's graduation today. Amidst the smiling at him cuz he looks funny in a cap, and tearing up cuz this means he's made it and all done and about to hit the complete opposite coast for grad school, and laughing at all the other kids' funny names, I did manage to actually pay attention to a few of the things the speaker(s) said.
There was one thing in particular - although I've forgotten both who originally said it and who said it today - that sparked me thinking about how it applied to my own life.

Which, come to think of it, is usually the reason someone says something - especially when they quote someone else. Someone famous. Someone dead.

Anyways, this is the gist of it:
Many of the shadows of our lives are cast by us standing in our own sunshine.

Isn't that interesting? And surprisingly true.

The intensity of the shadow over my life when I lost my hearing was because I was basking in the sunshine of my popularity and my musical talent and the direction my life was going. Any hearing loss would have been a shadow anyway, but the fact that I was so caught up in the big shot I thought I was and the even bigger shot I thought I was going to be that the sudden stop and U-turn I took that year or two threw me for a major loop.

And of course it made me think of what I would consider the biggest shadow over my life right now. And that is the fact that I'm at this school instead of the new one. And why is that really a shadow? Why do I hate it here so much? And it is because I was standing too tall in the sunshine of my life at LR.

This whole "many of the shadows of our lives are cast by us standing in our own sunshine" thing seems terribly obvious, and yet it never really occurred to me in quite that way. But now that I'm thinking about it, and applying it to various specific instances in my own life (both past and present) I think I'm learning to make those shadows become sunshine themselves. Or at the very least, I'm learning to sit down in my own sunshine so that the shadow cast isn't quite so big.