Now that the toils and trials of these two years are slowly coming to a close, perhaps it’s best to record a little of what I remember from those long and unusual days before they begin to fade away in a blur of green and brown. The past two years have been nothing less than a chapter of my life, and I’ve emerged from them none the worse for the wear, perhaps still slightly bewildered by the force with which it tore into my life, swept it from the comfortable tracks of a smooth, beaten path, left it literally spinning into the deepest reaches of another world, then whisked itself completely from my life with the same familiar, careless, violent rapidity with which it kicked over my closeted world.
Reflection upon any period of time that has gone by is always susceptible to tricks of the mind, to lapses in memory and the rosy glow of nostalgia; the hard edges of even the most trying and difficult times are somehow rounded and smoothened by the unconscious recognition that those episodes need only, and will only be experienced once. We have all gone through those events, one by one, like active spectators in a protracted and hugely tiring movie, wrenched ourselves through the Orwellian Physical Jerks of fitness training and foot drills, embraced numbers for names, gawked at the monumental and impregnable nature of Ministries and insuperable bureaucracies, guzzled the numbing Victory Gin of heavily-subsidised, diluted beer, chanted the indistinguishable slogans of Parties and assorted establishments, even adopted a Newspeak-like jargon of unintelligible unintelligibility. We have all gone through these things, or rather they have passed us by, our bodies performing the actions requisite of the present, our minds still haunted by memories of the pleasant past, or inhabited by intimations of a brighter future.
Accompanying the string of events that has transpired over the past two years has been a long chain of curious, remarkable human beings, some of them with whom I have fallen away, fallen apart, fallen out. Many of them, though, have remained, and become far more than just acquaintances, and their companionship has been absolutely uplifting, their presence steadying in times of shakiness. By learning about them, I have learnt a great deal from them, in particular the nature of social worlds I had never heretofore been exposed, about vastly dissimilar definitions of success, priorities and goals, diverse attitudes and perspectives, and frequently hugely different sets of values; it has often been nothing short of a glowing alternate paradigm of life. Values, however, are the creeds that we live by, and it is important to be discriminatory about what should be our own values without being unnecessarily critical about those of others.
The end of this year, closing in as surely and as congenially as the prow of a boat bumping gently into the docks as it returns from sea, is undoubtedly a welcome prospect, not least because it augurs the recovery of a familiar lifestyle and social environment. Some aches and pains linger on, naturally, from the journey, some of them the traces of old regrets from a long time ago that coalesce every now and then. I will always be rueing some missed opportunities. But for now, only the happiness attendant to the experience of emerging from the thickness of jungle foliage after a partially-failed navigational exercise, compass in one hand and clenched fist in the other, upon a well-used and strangely familiar road.
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