By Joshua Levs, CNN
Editor’s note: Josh Levs reports across all platforms for CNN. He lays out keys to achieving dreams in his TEDx Talk, “Breaking the system to achieve the impossible.” Find him on Facebook or Twitter.
(CNN) – It’s astounding how fast the words of a 22-year-old woman, her life suddenly cut short, have spread across the Internet and into the hearts and minds of people all over the world.
Marina Keegan, a budding writer, was once published by the New York Times and had a job lined up at the New Yorker. Also a playwright, she had a musical slated for a staging in August at the New York International Fringe Festival.
She wrote a moving essay in the Yale Daily News to inspire her fellow seniors as they graduated last week. She died in a car crash a few days later.
That column, in which she strives to remind her peers that “we have so much time,” has taken on a tragic, powerful resonance.
Discussing the “immense and indefinable potential energy” many felt as freshmen, she wrote that it’s important to remember “we can still do anything. We can change our minds. We can start over. … We’re so young. We can’t, we MUST not lose this sense of possibility because in the end, it’s all we have.”
The loss of Keegan is heartbreaking for many reasons. One of them is that she surely would have been among the too few people in the world who chase their dreams and bring them to fruition.