Highly Motivated And Eager To Learn

Eighteen, I have decided, is an interesting age to be. For the first time in my life, the things I want to learn outnumber the number of hours in the day to learn them. The effect, somewhat to my surprise, is a kind of buoyancy.

Transcendence is too fancy a word for this change. And yet it does feel sometimes as if I have lifted up off the surface of things like a balloon straining at its tether.

In junior-high school I caught my first real glimpse of "the big picture." That is, I began to understand how big the universe really is. Above us, innumerable wheeling galaxies blow like sand across a shoreless Sahara of spacetime. But there is an even vaster space inside. Each one of us is a portable universe and our entire lives are but the scratchings upon the surface of that inner space. And even on this puny speck of an earth in this instant of time, there are continents teaming with cities teaming with portable universes. This is the "big picture."

I did not understand this in junior-high school, mind you, I just began to understand it. It's only been in the last few years that a deeper understanding has begun to settle in, and even that, I suspect, is b...

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...ave your religions and I have mine, but the more we seek and the more we learn, the more we share. We have our finitude in common.

As I become comfortable with this finitude, I become comfortable with my mortality and with all my limitations. Gradually, I begin to float. As the splashing of my youth subsides I perceive that I have been swimming against a current. Paradoxically, it is only when I relax and accept my place in the river that I begin to make progress. Even now the river is sweeping me into new vistas.

This, much to my surprise, is what it is like to be 18.