Sitting having a quiet pizza with a friend familiar voices, nuances and gestures around me begin to filter into my awareness. Teenagers!! The place was filled with them and this was my half-term break away from working at college in "their" world.
It made me realise how far I have come....age....maturity......from being "like that", well maybe..... one particular young person, sitting behind me. I couldn't see him and didnt turn around, but I just knew what he was going to look like, what genre he would fit and even had the audacity to summise what his fate in the next few years would be.
Was it the reminder of me or boys i had met or the ones I notice at college. He was talking and talking, an almost professor like confidence, HIS thoughts, philosophies, he had no doubts, not a shadow of them. How he would write that song, create the movie, how cool it would be and of course very important; spot on in terms of educating us all on the clever and un-known information and ideas, only HE (and of course his chosen peers) could have and share with us all.
I was caught in two trains of thought; thinking from a "mature" perspective on how inflated, naieve and vaguely irritating his confidence was, knowing of course from this higher perspective that beneath it all he was deeply inscure! Or the other thought, that perhaps it was my perspective that was a version of his - thinking I knew better about his "youth", his ways, how he would end up disillussioned but not really believing myself either. I was in the end, almost envious of his conviction. It left me with the insight that perhaps I have been laszy with my "fake it till you make it" confidence that I had in younger years and that I dont employ it nearly enough now. In the end it made me grateful to work with and be around young people, even if they did arrive in my world when "off the job", they are showing me much about me and much about staying open to others, whatever their age!
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