Extended Moments of Clarity

When I was about the age of ten there were two main activities that took up my time. The first was playing with my friends and the second was avoiding going to bed. I excelled at both and the dark lines and bags under my eyes were not the bags of worry of a troubled precocious child, but one that was just having a good time. As most parents do, my parents looked after my accommodation, food, clothing, transportation, heating and more besides. My job was largely my own entertainment. As I continued to go through school it felt like things changed a great deal as the demands got louder about which classes I would need to attend. There was this brutal and outrageous call on my time known as homework. I imagined myself as a revolutionary battling with the oppressors that dared to take away my free time with their tests and preparations for the exams that they wanted me to take. It felt tough but in truth I knew it wasn’t. However, as the years advanced and I dressed in increasingly ridiculous clothes, I found myself having to learn more of the world. I struggled to see how simultaneous equations or glaciation figured in the real world, but I nevertheless listened and assimilated what I heard and kept it all in my head. In fact these lessons remain with me now and I could explain at the drop of a hat how to conjugate verbs in Latin or the number of pi to as many decimal places as my calculator would allow (3.141592654). I still wait patiently for a suitable opportunity to apply my learning in practice.