So, another summer has passed. I have come to appreciate seasons more and more as I get older. I’m not saying I am old but rather I have more freedom and so there’s something unstoppably refreshing about change. Change means action, it means getting a grip on yourself.
It’s very easy, especially while still living at home, to just accept the course of events as something apart from you. School is something you are forced to do, university is a choice, where once I wrote essays on books with the exact same themes year in and out, I now explore the world through its local literatures. I am tired of the British Novel but I love Magic Realism – especially Isabel Allende.
I do not deny the link between my ability to make good choices and other people making decisions for me. It is the great inverse proportionality of Canadian life.
But, I find that, like a lot of mathematical relationships, the relationship exists independent of the reality of a person’s situation. I have been in University for three years now but never all that excited to go back – it always seemed to me that it was a sort of chore I had to complete before returning to Toronto, to my ‘real’ life here.
I’m not sure why I do this, and maybe it’s just me, but I tend to segment my life, to say that this set of friends, set of interests and whims belong here not there. I’ve got my Toronto friends who I do Toronto things with. I’ve also got my Queen’s friends who I do Queen’s things with – but the two mixed like oil and water in my mind.
Perhaps, the thoughts, the divisions were part of something else I’m unaware of. The brain is the brain – I don’t how else to put it without using some diluting metaphor.
What I do know is that I became more self-fulfilling with my choices and this meant I began doing the things that I had only thought about at night in bed.
At first they were stupid things, usually related to girls though I am not the one to discount such experience. The friends I had were another important group of relationships because they allowed me to fulfill my whims without fear of judgment. If I wanted to start telling people about my dream of becoming a writer, why not have those people be the ones I see everyday anyways?
Some might draw from this that I used to be a bit of a dick, disdainful of both long term relationships and family values. For one, I was young and made mistakes – not big ones though, nothing that pressed on my mind for more than a week or two. I’m also not saying everyone ought to find self-fulfillment the same way as me. Some people are readers and some are writers.
It may not even require a drastic step at all, just some realignment. So that’s why I’m happy I guess. Not because of anything specific but because of everything. I could not be who I am not without who I have been.
Clay
Clayton Tomlinson 