A Beautiful Autumn Day

Just got back from my German class for today. That marks the "three quarters of the way" point through this course. In just over a month (DV) I will have finished German language at Sydney Uni. There is no more to do. From then on it's literature courses to the end of the (Pass) degree, hopefully at the end of 2009. Then I hope to do an honours year (actually 2 years for me, because I'm a part-timer). Then that elusive PhD in Germanic Studies??!!

I feel it's a bit wrong, ticking the days and years off like this. I don't want to wish my life away at all. It just helps to break a 16-year project into digestible chunks. To create some sense of progress through what seems like a very long journey through the woods.

Here in Sydney it is a beautiful autumn day. Not only in the University grounds but along many of the streets I drive through to get there, there are really colourful autumn trees! Although I'm counting the days and years, life is really not about progress at all, but about being in tune with the moment. Today sitting in class and walking under the trees may well be as happy as Graduation Day. I just wish I could feel like this all the time.

On the way back a former editor of "Honi Soit" (Sydney Uni's student newspaper) and a member of the present "Honi collective" who now writes the paper were on the radio. The former editor was there in 1966. In those days only the privileged could afford to go to Uni and do Arts, and they had a wonderful relaxed time (or at least they say so now). Les Murray, the famous Australian poet, says something similar. Listening to people from that era makes those days come alive - when people wanted to be educated, and were not driven by a need to be economic. There were no vocational guidance centres then! Mm, a great life if you were one of the privileged ones!!

I went to Sydney in 1970, but I wasn't one of the privileged ones. Instead I went on a scholarship. I lived in Wesley College, which was full of students who had gone through the GPS (Greater Public Schools, i.e. private school) system. I felt so out of it there, though I longed to be in it. I don't think it was the diference in money, it was a difference in self-perception. The other students just assumed they had the right to be there, and to be the doctors and lawyers of the next generation, but I had no such confidence. In the end I couldn't stay. It's fun but weird to do it again now - to feel all the feelings from that time, but looking through the telescope into the past, rather than looking to the future as one does at 18. That future (of a career, family, etc) is behind me now, rapidly receding. I need to keep looking to the future with optimism, confidence and enthusiasm. That's not hard academically, because that's how I feel. But the idea that I will ever work in a job where I feel optimistic, enthusiastic and as I do at Uni seems beyond me., a kind of polite fiction, that surrounds me because Unis are not "ageist" places! But I still do think it is theoretically possible. That's why I keep reading seek.com!!