School and Life and Mountains

I've been thinking about school a lot lately. I miss the desks. I miss slamming my Norton down on the wood with zealousness and scribbling notes about Elizabethan politics as fast as I can. I miss sitting cross-legged on the tables upstairs in the classrooms in Westminster, reading and re-reading Lear's lines while a classmate cross-references them against a later text. I miss having heated yet beautifully friendly debates with my peers about everything from the merits of fictional characters to the impact of the 16th century Church on modern society. I miss sweating buckets over a presentation that took two people three days and information from four different libraries to complete. (Ok, so I don't miss the perspiration so much as the jubilation that followed.) And I miss the realization that one completed task meant one more mountain climbed, providing guidance and experience to drawn from in all the expeditions to come.

But at this moment I confess to feeling ill-equipped to surmount the next obstacle in my life. School, while indeed challenging, always had a trail, made clearly visible by the countless students who had gone before. Postgraduate life appears to be devoid of any such aids. Perhaps that is why I struggle with it so?

Maybe these new challenges are a kind of cosmic smoke-signal or footprint in the sand meant to lead me back where I began. After all, I feel quite at home in academia, so why not return to base camp and start the journey afresh from a vantage point I am familiar with?

But then I think, hell, maybe striking out on an as-yet un-blazed trail would be better for me! Somebody had to be the first to summit Everest, right? And perhaps, if I'm lucky, I will find illumination in the perspective brought by the view that few ever see, and from the journey that leads not back to the familiar, but onward, into the unknown...