Masters Day 1 - James goes to school.

Periodically, I am going to take a moment to reflect on my thoughts and experiences of going back to school. These entries will probably be slightly, okay a lot, more esoteric than some of the other entries but I just want to take a moment to capture exactly what is going on inside my head throughout this year of renewed academe.

If you don't want to read James's "deep thoughts" then please feel free to exit now.

The picture I have included here is of the Old Arts Building on campus. I liked the old arches with the rays of bright sun breaking through...the poet in me saw that as being symbolic of my first day of study.

Here then is a stream of consciousness reflection, written while I was attempting to stay awake during an orientation session wherein the presenter was essentially telling a room full of jet-lagged post-grad students that "friends are important". I'm not sure any of us felt that we were getting our money's worth at that particular juncture.

Wow! Talk about a 20 year time warp! I'm baaaaack. This is all very new and exciting and big and scary but...familiar, too. More education at a young 42 feels in fact like a very comfortable place to be. Wrapped in the quasi-legitimate state of "furthering my career" (post-grad nonetheless) I am seemingly away from the stresses of everyone else's everyday life - work, family, the real world, whatever - and furthermore, I am entering a place where I am once again challenged to consider what the real world and the everyday really are.

Ahhh, but I also smell that arrogant bravado of knowing best and knowing all that only universities can muster. We will bring you the world, they say. Yes, perhaps, just as as long as your undergrads stay sober enough to stumble there! The contrast between the prof and the pub crawl seems, as always, to be a very weird, thin line. Why, just this morning I was listening to an associate professor of such and such wax poetic about the vice-chancellor as if he were some sort of god and not 30 minutes later I am reading about a play being performed in the Student Union Theatre that portrays that same god-like VC as a glam rocking nympho! This is university as it always is and was and I hope that I am able to enbrace it at every angle.

But I digress. More importantly, I was just reading in the most recent copy of the post-grad magazine an interview with a coursework masters student who is married with two young children as well as being a full-time student. She is also a published novelist but that just seems to be over-achieving. Anyway, she described her joy of being a student this way:

"...study connects me-as-I-am-now to me-who-I-was-then, before I was a mother. Every time I go to Uni I feel a curious sense of freedom: there's a slowing down of time, everything looks golden and dreamy...I love who I am now, I love my life, I adore my daughters, but I am still bereft and mystified at the loss of her."

This is a perfect description for the way study also makes me feel. Not the mother part - but the part about returning to me-who-I-was-then. It is indeed a privileged state of being that allows one to consider life at its most simple, most open, most possible. To walk out of a career (momentarily) and to walk back into school is one of the most freeing and uplifting things a person can do to their soul. Yes, there are still many important real world responsibilities off campus, but while in the lecture hall all time stands still. It is, once again, just you and your brain soaking up all that you can squeeze from that talking head at the front of the room - only this time you are much, much smarter! (If I only I had been old enough to appreciate what my third year Victorian Lit prof was telling me at the time! If Colin or Alex talk of a GAP year - I'm all for it! How about a GAP decade!?)

Alas, to go all the way back in time twenty years or more would mean I would need more hair, a smaller waist size, cowboy boots, and a CD collection that includes Bon Jovi's Living on a Prayer so, like the guy in the Diet Pepsi ad, time travel is probably not for me. But, what I do know, even after one day, is that I am once again back in a place, granted half way around the world, that opens up a part of my brain and my life that is familiar, freeing, and necessary for me to fully be the person I always have been.