caveat: another "aak!"
Before that exact moment I don't believe I had given much thought to the future. When you're twelve, you're just about hanging on that apex of the limbo between the living-in-the-momentness of childhood and the long, slow slope of growing up, where the future is always looming ahead of you. Just this morning I was thinking about the business of having all those years to advance in a career, of working hard to move up, get ahead, exercise ambition.
I don't completely understand that concept, ambition. It could be because it's so all-or-nothing. If you don't have it you will never amount to anything, I've been told. But there can be so much more to life, you know?
When I was twelve, the world started to become more sharply focused. In school, everyone began to be divided into categories: slow, average, gifted. We all knew who was who. I felt like I was watching the beginnings of so many stories and if I were on Facebook, I would know how they've unfolded. I imagine I might even be surprised in a few cases.
Well you won't be surprised to learn, I haven't been that ambitious, but I don't know I would have seen that coming at twelve, when I still felt I had so many years ahead of me. But then that was an entirely different world, a far more forgiving world.
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