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As you may recall I began a journey last year. What I have now come to see less as an educational journey and more of a spiritual journey. I went back to school. I went back to better myself, to show my kids that is never to late to fix a past mistake. I knew for years that I needed to go back to post secondary, but I allowed my self to shut the door, and to lock it tight. I didn't have time, I had little kids. We could not afford to pay back the loans (it's easier to think like this than to look at it for the investment that it actually is). I would look and feel like an idiot, as someone old enough to be most of my classmates mom. It was the latter excuse that really held me captive from my dream.
It was the best decision I have made this decade (other than deciding to have Elly that is)! The growth that I have experienced has been exponential. I have learned "things", lots of new and interesting book things. My biggest learning growth has been as a human being. All too often we put ourselves into a box. We as humans need to make sense of the world, and so we need to label it, and put it into a neat and tidy box / category. We go to public school and we make friends. We go high school we learn new things and decide what we really think we would like to be when we grow up. This is where we really begin to box ourselves get into the rigid category. We become a label, a jock, a nerd, a dork, a goth, artsy... you get it. We learn about the opposite sex and the games and rules around that (majority of the time they are found to be in our bubble category). We learn that although a heart can break in ways that feel irreparable, but that like every wound it will heal... it may leave a bit of a scar, but it will heal. We learn how to balance school, dating, friends and we jump into part time jobs. We go to work or we go to post secondary. Here we learn skills that pertain to our future selves. We make friends, we go into dating 201 the next level. We might toy with serious romance and what that means, maybe it means moving away from home and in with a partner. Each these levels in life is a step. You don't go back, you go forward.
Life becomes so much about living in that linear line, that colouring within the lines that we don't think about it. It is just life. We continue to live in our box, and we put others into easy to understand boxes. We view the world from our point, and we don't consider that life may look different if we just allowed ourselves to look at it from a different vantage point. We climb up each step of the ageing/ life journey, always looking ahead. To look behind or to the side would be foolish and counter productive. Always traveling in that linear line, there may be tiny bends, but we continue along that path until we reach old age. We take everything that we have learned from our vantage point along that path to be gospel. Our way of looking at the world is the correct way, hasn't life taught us that?
Here is what college has taught me so far. Life does not look the way that you perceive it to. Perception is not absolute reality, only your limited scope of reality. There are so many twists and turns that are safe to take if we just allow ourselves to take that risk. Failure is just an opportunity to become a better person, if you allow it to be. Here is the best lesson that I have learned, age and experience does not make you an expert. There are no such things as experts, only people that have learned more, but can still learn more again. By allowing yourself to stay in that self imposed box, you are doing yourself such a huge disservice, you are doing your soul a disservice.
The "idea" of college was terrifying, because it represented the unknown. I would have to step outside of my comfortably constructed box. That box that was labeled in permanent ink that said "Mother, Wife, Middle Aged, Middle Class, Adult Woman". My box instructions stated that I could only associate with people within my life category. I needed to play nice with all of the other categories, but I could only associate within my categorical listing. Had I allowed myself to be persuaded by fear to stay in that rigid box. That box has now been broken down and set aside for recycling. I am so much more than just a rigid box. There are so many people who are experts, experts in their own life experience and they have so much to teach me.
As the mother of teens it is easy to decide that I am an expert on all things teen, after all I was one once upon a time. I would not have been alone in this thinking, so many of us think this way. It is that same thinking as to how good today's generation have it, and that they got it all on our backs. Our way was the right way. To clarify, this is dysfunctional thinking I have come to realize. It is this dysfunctional thinking, at least I believe that creates that chasm that exists between parents and their teens. Today's kids don't have it easier, or worse, it's different. Their category rules are not the same as mine were. Their rules are different, and I have to work hard to understand them. To allow myself to create "us" and "them" categories, would be a disservice to my children, but more even to myself.
The young adults in my class are my equals, and in many ways they are my superiors. They have so many things to teach me, if I allow myself to be open to their teaching. They are experts in the field of teens / young adults. They allow me to glimpse into that strange and wonderful world of today's teen, and to better understand my own teens. They are teaching me the new social rules that my children live by. I am growing intellectually, and spiritually because these "friends" are in my life. It seems odd to say that as a gulp 47 year old woman I have 20 year old friends, but I do. I am blessed and privileged that they allow me into their world and are as open and kind to me as they are. By recycling that box I built for myself I am able to see the world differently, better. I can see from so many vantage points now, and this will make be a better mother, and a better human being.
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