Thursday, April 25, 2013

I Can See Clearly Now

In my high school yearbook my senior year, under "ambition," where other kids listed the college they would be attending or the career path they had chosen, one of the ambitions I wrote was  "...to never stop growing and changing."

It's tough, especially at this point, to say how much that ambition represented a sincere commitment to growth and change and how much it was intended as a subtle dig  at the townsfolk in that tiny,* stagnant town where little seemed changed since the Fifties and even the young people acted old. Either way, if I had only realized how much of that growing and changing would be accomplished by learning and unlearning and relearning the same few life lessons only to unlearn them again, all the better to be smacked upside the head by the same old truth all over again, I probably would've picked a different goal.

They say hindsight's twenty-twenty, but if I've got such a clear view of where I've been, how the hell do I keep ending up back where I started?


V is for Vision


*The class of 1986 had 71 students; it was the largest class anyone could remember.

6 comments:

  1. I can't imagine having a high school that small. my graduating class had 660, and that worked well for me, since I was shy and weird and it took a large pool of people for me to find friends...

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    1. I went to three high schools--the biggest of which had a graduating class of a little over 300, the next a little over 100 and then the one I graduated from. I can definitely identify with the benefits of being able to blend in a little.

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  2. Perhaps that is wisdom? The realizing that you have to learn the same things over and over?

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    1. I like that idea...I just always thought wisdom would feel, I don't know, a little more wise.

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  3. You were one profound teenager! I think I wrote "to spend the summer at the beach!" Yup. Not exactly a pillar of ambition here. And 71 students??? WOW.

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    1. Marianne, perhaps it will make you feel better to know that throughout my senior year, when I was asked (in person) what I was going to be when I grew up, my reply was "a burden on society." This "growing and changing" thing was less profound than deliberately vague, I think. I was terrified and did not have A CLUE what to do or where to go after graduation.

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