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hawkwing_lbIn eight days, I turn twenty.
I write that phrase, and I sit here and look at it. Twenty years old. I’ve used up one-quarter of my life-expectancy; lived two years past legal voting and drinking age; done my Leaving Cert and made the decision to repeat the first year of college. Should I feel something, contemplating the anniversary of my nativity?
Although, admittedly, I haven’t actually celebrated a birthday since I was about fourteen. So I suppose I can be excused a lack of anticipation.
Growing up is a strange thing. It’s a process that never stops, even when you think it ought to have. Learning more about yourself, and about the world: not always good things. But knowledge should never be scorned, should it? Because a thing is unflattering doesn’t make it less true.
When I parted from my schoolmates -- most, I suspect, for what has been the last time -- after our ‘Debs’ last August, and went on to university, I had no idea what was ahead of me in college, and less idea of the pressures that would result from attempting to treat college the same way I had treated school.
There’s more than one way of circumnavigating walls. You aren’t required to slam your head against them until they fall down.
‘Cause, a lot of the time when you do that, your head breaks before the wall does.
I’ve learned a hell of a lot in the last year. It’s left me rather humbler and not at all sure of my equilibrium, but maybe I can learn to be a better and wiser person because of that.
Or in spite of it; there are many ways to learn.
Sometimes the journey matters more than the destination; some destinations, you never reach. And sometimes you don’t even know what destination you’re groping towards: you just have to keep stumbling forward in the dark.
Life is what happens when you’re making other plans.
I write that phrase, and I sit here and look at it. Twenty years old. I’ve used up one-quarter of my life-expectancy; lived two years past legal voting and drinking age; done my Leaving Cert and made the decision to repeat the first year of college. Should I feel something, contemplating the anniversary of my nativity?
Although, admittedly, I haven’t actually celebrated a birthday since I was about fourteen. So I suppose I can be excused a lack of anticipation.
Growing up is a strange thing. It’s a process that never stops, even when you think it ought to have. Learning more about yourself, and about the world: not always good things. But knowledge should never be scorned, should it? Because a thing is unflattering doesn’t make it less true.
When I parted from my schoolmates -- most, I suspect, for what has been the last time -- after our ‘Debs’ last August, and went on to university, I had no idea what was ahead of me in college, and less idea of the pressures that would result from attempting to treat college the same way I had treated school.
There’s more than one way of circumnavigating walls. You aren’t required to slam your head against them until they fall down.
‘Cause, a lot of the time when you do that, your head breaks before the wall does.
I’ve learned a hell of a lot in the last year. It’s left me rather humbler and not at all sure of my equilibrium, but maybe I can learn to be a better and wiser person because of that.
Or in spite of it; there are many ways to learn.
Sometimes the journey matters more than the destination; some destinations, you never reach. And sometimes you don’t even know what destination you’re groping towards: you just have to keep stumbling forward in the dark.
Life is what happens when you’re making other plans.
