Stern faces

Sometimes I fear the passage into mid maturity and the rounding off of edges that many seem to undergo in their mid-thirties.

Already I detect a change in myself too. The fire is turning down and the sharpness, the vivid choices and the dramatic moments seem to ebb away. This tendency is revealing itself with alarming regularity among people in Watermouth, the attitude of “well, students will be students but now it’s time to move on, now it’s time for stern faces and responsibility and learning to accept doing what you don’t want to do.”

Not that I hold the average Watermouth student lifestyle up as some paragon of human social development, but it does entail certain freedoms and opportunities that many throw away, as though these all just disappear into the sideboard drawer along with the degree certificate. And this is the goal: no mellow maturity, but trauma and struggle, a crisis of responsibilities every day—to the self, not the crisis of circumstance I’ve drifted into since Westdorgan Road, LSD, etc., for this just obscures my mindfulness of self and chokes all perspective.

Sometimes the simple articulation of thoughts in words and sentences seems like Herculean labour!