Those yellow buses

Education is one of my primary concerns, if not the crux of all I work for and toward.  There is simply much that depends upon our understanding and what our perceptions are of that understanding.  How else do we rise but by how we are raised; what else influences us to our actions and initiatives but what we are taught and what we are not?  I have often thought that education may be the greatest institution, as it can perpetually ensure the best and eventually create the most of our living.

But this talk sounds like one of ideals alone, because our experiences in education are too often dwarfed and diminished by the oppressive weight of school in our history and memory, and the two are not usually comparable.  We all remember our school days, for better or worse, for all the things we are happy to reflect on and all the rest that is regrettable and remorseful.  Admittedly, it was many things for us: a jail, a jungle, a clubhouse, a society, a testing block, a proving ground, a source of hope, humiliation, humor, and trial.  Now and then you learned something beyond your relationship to your cellmates, but mostly it was just a presence that you did not doubt and knew was futile to resist, and then it ends and you feel like you’ve been held back a decade from living and have to start from scratch.

I almost want to apologize for the morose cynicism that the subject brings out in me, but it is there.  From where I write I can see children from several different schools coming and going.  The older ones stroll lethargically down the sidewalk, chatting to their friends, able to walk home from the neighboring high school, but are still enthralled to it, despite their apathy.  And the little ones who are given away and received at the bustop by parents, with their printed backpacks and abundant spirit, swallowed and spit out by those yellow buses, they still have many years to go.  I feel for them all rather desperately, wishing that they could understand what they do not, and inwardly growl at the passing buses, then have to smile and sigh because I do not mean any hostility to a system that is only what we have made it to be and can yet change, and because I’m trying to do what I can.  And if this course we take to raise adults and teach them self-government and wisdom does not work we will have to acknowledge it and reform it in time.

What I want to ask you now is your own experience.  What do you remember from your school days?  What do you believe was the influence and impact of this?  I am always keen for your insight and dialogue.

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Complementary ends

In youth, it seemed to me that there was no greater goal than that of finding someone to be with, some beautiful match to accompany me through the better part of days and share with me the close intimacy that people can have, as well as the insights and moments of life that are subtle and wonderful, and rightly intimate.  I went through great lengths seeking this thing that I could envision so wholly, that I could feel, and the absence of it was wounding.

I never got completely what I looked for, but I did get samples of it, enough to offer experience.  And time went by, furthering the experience, endeavors, and trials that would craft what I meant to seek from life.  I came to a point where the purpose I couldn’t ignore was a vocation and the people I needed were people in general, not any one person.  I wished to contain myself in the workings of the world, not in the confines of romance.  Looking back, I see passionate youth, willing to do so much, but unaware of itself and the significance of everything around it, so that the only available end becomes the arms of another and the little world that this grants.  With this, it would be easy to tuck oneself away and close off what couldn’t be faced.

I tend to think that if I had gotten what I wanted in youth, it would have been harder to make the solitary journery necessary to learn what I could and should do, the travel of which speaks more of adulthood.  When some context has so much to offer and incite in us, there is no one that should be isolated from this.  And yet after having come so far, there is still that call for an individual and intimate complementation that has not utterly died out.  Nor do I believe it must be deafened and not answered.  It is an interesting crossroads, having surpassed a desire but not being completely free from it, finding control in what you understand of things, but knowing it is not enough.  Surely a life requires many things not one, or almost the same thing in many forms, and the balance that would ensure accord.  I’ll do what I must, for myself.

And now I wonder, where are you on this road?  Which of us has someone to share history with and which do not?  What have been the hardships that come in either instances?  What have been the gifts?

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