Reflections

The time is drawing nigh – this dreaded series of heart-breaking, gut-retching closing pieces that I will write prior to my imminent departure from this wonderful place of magic and life-altering experiences. The die is cast; the tides have reached back from its ends and looped a knot through the vast expanses of time, to slip back past the beginning to seek out a new balance and center until the next cycle washes more relics ashore and etches new meanings again. The circle has been drawn and it is complete, and in a moment will be started anew, to greater depths and hopefully with further details waiting to be written upon its shores and stories.

In the beginning there was school and nothing but the work I had tasked myself to do by committing to the Oxford Study Abroad Program. I didn’t know if Oxford was going to happen – it almost looked as if it wouldn’t because of the logistical matters and financial aid. There were times when I was cornered for time and pressed for deadlines. I managed to jump through a series of hoops and meetings until one day, in early March, I arrived in the U.K., and uncertain as to whether or not I could manage studying abroad while taking in Oxford. I wasn’t prepared for anything else except to be blown away by merely being in the U.K., in Oxford. At the end of that exercise, I finished rather unscathed, plus or minus some minor bruises and projects, and succeeded beyond my imaginings.

School allows for a certain certainty that one can achieve something if enough work and effort go into the task-at-hand – no matter how difficult or tedious. One simply ploughs through it – passionately or dispassionately or otherwise. Scholarly education focuses one to develop certain mental muscles with a modicum of intellectual curiosity, emotional resistance, or pain – all with an end towards grades, transcripts, scholarships, transfers, and degrees, not to mention enlightenment.

The real education – that brand of education that cannot be bought, beggared, earned, or prepared for – the real education was in learning how to live, stretch, and become alive again. It came to me when I no longer had to be beholden to multiple syllabi or bound to prepare for tests, papers, and miscellaneous other obligations that come with being solely a student of school. Life happened, and I found myself not knowing, learning what I did not know, and trying to understand what I did – which shifted daily, depending on the confluence of events or the elements in play. Coming back to life again is a scary place to be.

I first learned this when I became attached to the now notoriously beloved The Corridor on Cowley Road. I’ve written plenty about it in my pieces, but there is another side to it that brought me weeks of turbulent not-knowing, painful insights, happy highs, crises of confidence, and dreary lows that ended in question marks. That education disallowed questions, preparation, note-taking, strategizing, or analyses because at the crux of it was a derivation of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle wherein that which is being observed is affected by the mere act of observing it. Whatever I thought I knew, I no longer did, and I struggled in my attempt to understand the ever-pervasive “it.” I found myself in uncharted waters. The bottom line was that I found friends, a place that I felt more and more attached to, I became somewhat known, and was invited into the lives of very special people who have taken me in as their own, and walked me through the great divide between “what you know” and “what you don’t know” words of kindness.

Where things started to get mired is in a complicated cacophony of the words swirling in the back of my head to the effect that my days were marked which is highly caustic to being in the moment for whatever the moment was. This was juxtaposed with time nipping at my heels, and, alas, love – that awful thing that I want to instinctively chuck in the nearest biohazard bin and irradiate at times. Love is definitely not academic – that much I can say with a degree of accuracy. Had I not gone to Corridor, but instead stayed at The Star Pub, I would have been home right after my birthday, which was far more than a month ago and things would definitely have been much simpler.

It has been exactly two months that I’ve lived here as a “civilian student,” and in those two months after the end of the semester, I have been reshaped in so many ways I would have never imagined before setting off to the U.K. on fateful day back at the beginning of March. The world is no longer the same place I came from and I am no longer the same person I arrived as.

More to come…
Upcoming features:
Cornwall – a Week of Splendor
Brookes: Do or Die?
Come What May
Synthesis
The End of an Era
Extemporaneous Entity