Futurism or Something

I consider the future full of potential. Potential and hope. There’s something promising in the vast number of possibilities I have open to me as a Twenty-One year old living in England coming to the end of their undergrad. Especially considering having grown up in a loving family that moved from South Africa and blossomed. With two sisters having established themselves comfortably in their fields after their respective postgrads and yet there’s something, something not quite.

Here I am. Needing to write essays and a dissertation for a Degree that seems to have reduced me to nothing. A Liberal Arts programme based so resolutely around the head of department’s conceptions of pain and pleasure, that the very modules correspond to chapters out of his book.

I cannot write the essay I must for him because I don’t want to encourage his ego or degree. I cannot write my dissertation either because he, even though he’s my dissertation tutor, will not read it. He will email and answer questions but he will not even glance at it. In every. single. degree system I know of, from friends to family, the marking tutor will at least glimpse at some parts of the dissertation but not this liberal arts scheme.

So I have to write the thing entirely on my own, which is absolutely fine. Having been a student for many years I’ve embedded a need to prove myself and to do so without any help. Never do I send essays to lecturers, and yet I can’t help but feel as though this is something that should be shared. A 10,000 word dissertation that’s apparently at master’s level should be something that you get a little help with instead of a refusal, because then the tutor “would have read it already.” I mean, I’m not writing a piece for your pleasure. I’m being graded on this.

With this breakdown it’s no wonder why, when we ran out of material but of course had more to study, we ended up feeling as though something was lacking and a promise was not fulfilled, and then why he tried to enable us to be taught by other people outside of the degree.

Which brings me to another segment of world goings on that I’m going to gloss over because I don’t have time to rant when I should be out having food in a restaurant in Moab, because instead of knuckling down to write I left the country in an attempt to get some perspective. The issue is the entire education system that I’ve learned to play and know how to accomplish well in, but simply don’t want to have to do.

Initially there needs to be some semblance of interest in the subject, otherwise your brain will not mull over ideas therefore being unable to run riot in critically examining something. Then you have to have used your critical muscle enough to see not only superficial aspects but deeper ones that provide more interesting critical examinations, which unfortunately comes easier to some than others but this is simply how brains work, and in fact if the education system was decent it would take this into consideration (which is perhaps why we now get visual, kinetic and audio learnings, although, you know, not really). Then you must write and research and plan and rewrite. You exchange time for a higher grade, or you happen to write something exceptional the night before because your brain considered deconstruction and King Lear the perfect marriage and ran with it.

This is the trick to accomplishment: Time. And it is expressly this that I have a hard time handing over to someone especially when it’s being transferred into pleasurable reading for them.

I was sat down the other day, when back at University, and asked myself if I were to die and I had only a short time to live what would I do and the answer came in the form of travelling.

Travelling with the smallest amount of gear so I could pack a skateboard and experience everything and anything I could. A life, however short, lived getting high off of new experiences, adrenaline, and new people sounded wonderful. A life lived in the magnificent action of simply ‘doing’, be it either still or active. A drink with friends is a wonderful life and it made me think: you get to circumvent the entire system of living in the western world if you’re dying, because you don’t need to plan for the future and sometimes the idea becomes terribly shiny in potential.

But now, having done nothing but ‘do’ for the past five days, except every now and again, I have a distinct need to think some more. To consider and examine and maybe even improve. But I have no idea how to get to this place. Do you write novels? Critically examine books? Philosophise?

It’s a hard thing; trying to come up with a future. I guess that’s why the future is irretrievable and the present is all we are able to grasp.