A mature student

A mature student? I was already mature long before I even knew it. Long before I was given the option to begin the university career as a matter student.

I followed protocol and bam… I’m in… in the honours program. I thought great! Until I understood that it had nothing to do with my high calibre grades already attained at its precursors but extra credit requirement, which meant more money that I did not have, or care to spend to get the answers I felt I seriously needed to make it through. And all that experiential hard knocks did not even count for advanced standing ovations. What the hell!

I went along for a while and after my bus stalled for the third time I decided that’s it.

There got to be a better way. For my sake, there had better be a better way.

I began chatting up my weird self; keeping it busy and on the ball because I was on a roll or may it had put me on a role. Hah, this is no small jealous God I was dealing with. We challenged each other; I won, it won… it won, I won.

A whole new ball of wax began taking shape as it melted in my cerebral cortex.
I graduated from wanting to understand myself to wanting to know myself and progressed to wanting to understand life itself. Which now that I come to think of it is what I really wanted to know all along and that’s what all these weird dialogue were injecting in and infected my mind with the whole time with topics that provoked my curiosity to find out:

Where did you come from?
How did I find myself there- by the where, that was one of the lame elucidations
How do babies find their way in their mothers’ belly
I was really fascinated by that mountain that protruded from the lady’s stomachs… I mean how much did she have to eat, she could hardly walk? And the next day poof- stomach gone and baby in arms and I want to know how did the baby find its way out… that must be some intelligence that no one needs to teach her or him and how do twins know which is first? Don’t get me started with my curiosity about multiple births when I heard that one and two are average.
The big scariers were the ones about the reason to go through life only to die and be put in a big hole and covered as though hidden treasure that never get discovered, ever again...that later explained as death.
Why do people die?
What was so bad that they did?
Why would God kill his children; let them starve, work so hard for a snack; let them cry and get sick and pray and pray and pray without ceasing. Where’s the fun in that! The fun though was in asking all of these questions, musing my art of asking the right questions and not too interested in the answer as much as at the look in those eyes that stared down the chimney that led to my heart.

Too many big questions from such a small sickly child. Honestly from that time onwards I thought and began to believe I was a serious case of difficult little big person to get along in this world and in mine and God’s and everybody’s and that I was in for a lifetime of being strange, different and even at times a great intruder in the most irritating kind of way.

I was sorry that I was such a menace and did everything I could to correct that; and when I could not think of any way out I asked God to remake me. I wonder what God did when I prayed that! I think I have a pretty good idea.

So many opportunities to unfold our petals and let our beautiful flowers flourish are tossed and trampled and, then left to fade away and ‘die’.