It is a Saturday and I just got back from visiting with a young friend who by the way was one of my students from my days as a teacher. (I should tell some of those stories soon). On Saturdays, I like to sleep in and rest do laundries and general housekeeping that don’t get done during the course of the week and just laze a little and get some of the energy back that was spent during the week.
We had gotten talking and over a period of a week, preceding this visit, he was able to talk me into coming over to see him. As I hadn’t seen him in about four years it was not so tough for me to go check him up, and give my day of rest.
Getting there was not bad because traffic was light. One of the reasons I like to not go out on weekends is the nasty traffic you have to face. ‘Even on weekends?’ you may ask. YES!
It was nice seeing him. He had of cause grown bigger than the last time I had seen him I teased him about not being as tall as I am. He smiled and puffed up telling me that he was still growing. At what age I asked? He said it and I asked him about what he learnt in his biology class and how that measured to what he was telling me now? He said he still had a tooth growing. Well that got me.
At his place we got gisting trying to catch up with the years that had gone by and how far he had come. Interesting was the fact that though he had not gotten into school when his mates and friends were getting into school, now in his second year he was doing great. With a grade point of over 4 and closer to 5, I was extremely happy for him.
So we got talking and the talk drifted to some of his other friends. Some of them had gotten into school before he did, some just about the time he did. Some had had to take prelim courses to get into school. The shocking things were the tales he told of how some of the guys were now big time drinkers and smokers not just cigarettes but also hemp to say the least.
The incredulous look on my face was definitely obvious because he asked me a question that I had only just recently come to terms with. ‘Did I think that they would stay the way they were back when?’
I didn’t know how to go about answering initially. But I said to him. I know growing up is experiential and you will want to try out a lot of the things you hear or see on TV. But, I said to him, there must be a limit that you set else u would just find yourself going beyond the comeback zone.
So when he talked about some of his friends that I knew and who were close to me, and how they had gone off, it was a big shock to me. I was familiar with some the parents and majority of them are unaware of what was going on in their children’s lives.
That got me thinking about when they were in school. The majority of those having issues were those I had spent quite some time with telling them about life. How life was not easy, about how life would take its toll on them if they do not put themselves in a stead that would allow them take from life what they deemed fit for them.
It was painful because these guys are like my brothers, friends, even sons. And every time I talked to them it was always to have them ask when I was getting married so they could get their suit and be part of the grooms men. But as I sat with him and talked and reminisced, I had to let him know that it was painful to be privy to so much information and not be able to do anything about it because they were all young adults and had their own lives to live.
It is amazing what we do with our lives when we think we are young. How we just throw caution to the wind and think that we would always be young forever and our parents would always be there for us or think that we would always have it easy because the world is rosy and all that. And whilst we are being stupid and silly people that know what they want out of life dig in their heels and they just don’t let go.
And after several years have passed we look back and then we are like ‘what did I do wrong?’ At that point it is always so difficult to understand why we didn’t just do what we were supposed to do. I worry a lot about our young people about how they waste their lives and how they don’t think that what they do now computes to what or who they eventually become.
It is my heart desire to always be able to talk to young people, share my mind with them and tell them the truth about life; that life sucks. And you have to be able to give it everything it takes to get out of it everything you want. Life would give to you only what you demand of it.
Well, one can only do so much. I just continue to work at being the best that I can be so that I can encourage them to be the best person they can be. I hope that for them, they come to the early realization of what they require of life and be ready to go after it with guns blazing.
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