Chapter Seven: On Age and Youth (~jinghan)

Since the start of university, I seem to have reverted to a childish fascination with everything. All the small things excite me – like water falling from the sky, the warmth of beds, the cups of acorns, the shoes people wear, the shininess of pull-rings and the cracks in pavements. I have even created some new cork-dolls from those champagne corks that look just like a person when you draw a face on the larger end – my last family of cork-dolls retired way back in primary school.

While this childish fascination seems to keep me occupied and interested in the world, I cannot help stopping every now and then and feeling like a very small person in a very large world. When questions such as “what will you do with your life?” are asked of us over and over, it feel like maturity is forced upon us, rather than something you naturally grow into.

The first year university experience exposes a fundamental contradiction.

We feel the need to act mature and intelligent. Yet we want the freedom and insight of youth. University of the pinnacle of the celebration of youth, and yet at the same time it is our first step into an adult world that we were previously excluded from. Some uni friends have said to me that they feel “old” now that they are in uni and certainly that’s the label that would have popped up in my head when I was back in high school. But of course to the rest of the world, uni students are invariably young and boisterous; now that I am exposed to a whole new world of things I was ignorant about  and people who are smarter than me I feel inclined to agree.

What do we really catagorise to be? Young or old?

Or perhaps the real question is: what do we want to think ourselves as? Young or old?

I must admit that I had a fear that thinking myself as mature and wise, I will become stubborn and inflexible about my views of the world. “Old” people have this way of talking like they know everything: talking, talking, but forgetting how to listen. Perhaps this is why I am letting my inner child express herself. I talked a lot in the first few weeks of university, but now I find myself sitting and watching the world with greedy eyes. Watching people walk. Watching the leaves fall. Watching the wind blow.

But of course my inner child is also unwelcome for her distaste of taking responsibility of the future. Us science students like to generalise Arts as the course that people end up doing if “they don’t know what they’re going to do in the future”, but really, I think that’s just to cover up the fact that many of us don’t know what we’re going to do either. In the university student world where the future seems to be always looming and where a clear vision of the future is admired, my inner child sometimes shies away under the warm covers feeling judged and redundant.

However in the end, won’t all of life be like this? A precarious balance between our intuitive childish wonder at the world and a need to be responsible for our situation in life? Uni exposes a fundamental contradiction between our desires of youth and age; but perhaps it can also be the time for us to create a balance between these two different sides of the person that will last us the rest of our lives.

I talked to a graduate student the other day. He had studied a Bachelor of Science as well. I wasn’t sure I had quite heard right when he said he was a fireman, so I asked again:

“Sorry what are you doing at the moment?”

“I’m a fireman,” he said with a grin.

He eventually admitted that he had a day job working in a scientific lab, but I liked the fact that he saw himself as just a fireman. How many children will say “fireman” when they are asked “What do you want to be when you grow up? How many first years will say “fireman” when they are asked the questions “What are you going to do after you graduate?”

I like that. In the future, I’ll know what I’ll want to be in the future. And I can always have childish dreams, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have a future.