Graduation is more terrifying than it was four years ago. We knew we didn't have wings, and we were so sure of ourselves. We knew what the future held. After plans fell through and life changed, we are not sure of anything.
Where to go next year? Shall I begin my life professionally? Continue as a student of words? Both?
This is far too personal.
What grounds you to the world? Why do you not pick up and fly away? Is it your own basis towards the home you have made? Your friends and family? Are you happy where you are?
Where would you be if you had a chance?
A friend once told me that we should be like turtles, going wherever we want and have the home on our backs. We should be okay with ourselves wherever we go.
Be okay to retreat from the world.
The world is scary.
I am okay with being a turtle. Going around the world slowly, interacting as little possible, feeling secure in oneself. That is fine. But the whole conversation, I thought of one page in Small Gods by Terry Pratchett.
Now consider the tortoise and the eagle.
The tortoise is a ground-living creature. It is impossible to live nearer the ground without being under it. Its horizons are a few inches away. It has about as good a turn of speed as you need to hunt down a lettuce. It has survived while the rest of evolution flowed past it by being, on the whole, no threat to anyone and too much trouble to eat.
And then there is the eagle. A creature of the air and high places, whose horizons go all the way to the edge of the world. Eyesight keen enough to spot the rustle of some small and squeaky creature half a mile away. All power, all control. Lightning death on wings. Talons and claws enough to make a meal of anything smaller than it is and at least take a hurried snack out of anything bigger.
And yet the eagle will sit for hours on the crag and survey the kingdoms of the world until it spots a distant movement and then it will focus, focus, focus on the small shell wobbling among the bushes down there on the desert. And it will leap . ..
And a minute later the tortoise finds the world dropping away from it. And it sees the world for the first time, no longer one inch from the ground but five hundred feet above it, and it thinks: what a great friend I have in the eagle.
And then the eagle lets go.
And almost always the tortoise plunges to its death. Everyone knows why the tortoise does this. Gravity is a habit that is hard to shake off. No one knows why the eagle does this. There's good eating on a tortoise but, considering the effort involved, there's much better eating on practically anything else. It's simply the delight of eagles to torment tortoises.
But of course, what the eagle does not realize is that it is participating in a very crude form of natural selection.
One day a tortoise will learn how to fly.
I do not know how to ground myself to myself and to one location. Location is everything. Imagine Huck Finn in Egypt or Greece. Imagine Great Gatsby in 1500s Britain.
What makes you stay in one place or leave it? How do you choose a location to live in for a time.
The future is freaking me out. Damn New Years.
