After the conference presentations last night I went to a dinner thing, and then to another thing, and after that, down to a little basement bar in town. The bar was full of locals -- lots of beards, lots of Red Sox hats and T-shirts, lots of eyeliner. No expensive black jackets and funky glasses. I got there and was tipsy and exhausted, so I leaned against the railing and watched people laughing and prowling around the bar. I felt far away.
And then I made my way to the bar and sat for a while drinking my PBR, and suddenly a woman across the bar called my name, excited and disbelieving. "SHERRY?!?" I peered at her and recognized the face of a young woman I taught sailing to 9 years ago. She made her way over to me and gave me a great big hug and we talked for a long time about these past nine years, and what she's done in this time. She graduated in May. Her college sailing experience was crowned by disappointment -- at Nationals, she was pulled out after six races, and I could see the intensity of the emotions she still carried about that. Oog. I told her about how my college sailing career ended the same way -- after a very promising season and some hard training, and indeed even a few great races in the regatta itself, I choked, for reasons I couldn't understand. Oh, it stung. It took me a long time to stop being angry with myself. I could see in my young friend that same struggle. And there was so much more. Talking with her brought me back to my own post-college confusion -- about who I was, what I wanted to do, how to be myself. She told me about her life, what she's learned, what she's afraid of about herself, what her friendships are like, how she's changed since the time I knew her, and how she's the same.
When I got out of college I came here to Camden for a summer, to teach sailing and be around beauty. I ended up staying for four years. I look back on those four years as a rich time but so full of painful lessons and self-imposed pressure. The locals in the bar were the crowd I knew when I lived here. And my former student was here living through the same kind of struggles. Somehow because I'd known her when she was 14 and she'd looked up to me she opened right up to me and I wanted to hug her, and tell her that the mistakes you make in your twenties are all gifts. What I really wanted was to go back to myself at that time, with low self-confidence and so much self-imposed pressure and this burning desire to do the right thing without knowing what it was, and forgive myself for the mistakes still ahead of me. I tried my best to give her that, and saw her eyes fill with tears and so did mine.
Thanks for a lovely read from Maine on a sunny Saturday morning in Schenectady. Yes, the mistakes of youth (and not-so-youth) are gifts. Wouldn't it be great if we all had a little Sherry-voice inside saying with a hug, "it's a gift, an opportunity."
It's better to make a mistake, trying to learn who you are and how you fit in on this planet, than to continue to live a mistake for fear of making another.
Posted by: David Giacalone | October 23, 2004 at 10:52 AM
S --
what an interesting day you had, intense exploration of the possibilities that the future holds at pop!tech, then an out of the blue intimacy with your past... and you sitting just next to the center as the maelstorm swirled.
made me think of the here and now as the eye of a hurricane; a hurricane in time that's caused by the mixing of the two strong fronts: the future and the past.
...and that in order to walk confidently into the future it is so important to understand the past.
what a day that was...
Posted by: matt | October 23, 2004 at 11:02 AM