Back to the Future

A blogging friend has been writing a book on our university years, those of us who were at Rhodes in the early 1990's. He has been posting drafts and it has made for amazing reading. I've laughed out loud, and I've sat and thought hard, and I've felt more than a bit weepy on occasion. Today I am sitting here, recovering from a nasty lurgy, with an aching hip and tired eyes, and I am thinking of that past. I'm looking at my sons and reminding myself how good it is to be here, in the future some of our contemporaries didn't get to make, a present they are not part of, except in memory.

When you leave home and go away to university, you feel like a grown up. You get given an awful lot of freedom in one fell swoop and this, coupled with the adolescent's belief in their own immortality, can be, shall we say, a trifle dangerous. You drink too much, take too many drugs, snog and sometimes sleep with unsuitable people. Sometimes you find yourself doing all of the above because everyone else is, sometimes it's such fun the first time that you just do it again and again (ah, tequila) and sometimes it is the only way out of a situation you wish you hadn't got yourself into in the first place...

It's a steep learning curve. Add to this the freedom of living away from home, possibly having your own wheels for the first time, and of course, of being surrounded by people brighter, wittier, sparkier and more beautiful than you imagined possible; add to this the freedom to sit up all night talking about your lives, their lives, books, poetry, politics, dreams and ideals... well, that makes for an extremely heady, giddy, gloriously intense learning curve too. And what a time to be a young student at a South African university! The ANC was unbanned, the old order was falling apart and free elections were just around the corner. In the wider world, the Berlin Wall had just recently fallen, and communism was collapsing. The whole world was alive with new possibilities, and we were there, at the nerve centre of it all. Aren't you always, at 18??

Some of us didn't make it. Flew too high, flamed too brightly, burned too fast. John Leahy, jumping from a bridge during boat races, and falling so terribly wrongly... and his body, being pulled from the river 20 minutes later. Matt Jones, climbing onto a stationary train as a prank, accidentally hitting a live wire and all that glory lost...

Too many others, and I was so nearly one of them. It's a bit difficult, sitting here half a lifetime later, at 36, to recapture that sense of the numinous possible. Life in the greater world is just too hectic, just too rushed. We're too tired and, perhaps, too jaded, to appreciate the universe in the way we used to. So, for today, I'm using that ache in my hip as a reminder to be thankful that I'm still here. Older, tireder, still unsure of what I really want to be when I grow up, but here. In the future.

I'm very glad I made it.