First post. Breaking the ice. The drop has fallen.

The drop has fallen

Last year, I was supposed to write a blog, called “My Twentieth Year” (because once you turn 19, you’re actually living your twentieth year)! It was created, designed, ready and waiting patiently for me to spray paint it with whatever bottled up thoughts my colourful soul wanted to explode. But somehow it just never happened. My twentieth year came and went and now here I am. Twenty.  I have three pages which open automatically when I open Chrome, and one is a countdown to May 13, my birthday. I set it up to count down to my 20^th Birthday, but now it’s to my 21^st. My TWENTY FIRST BIRTHDAY. No offense to people older than 21, but for me, 21 is old. 21 is legal everywhere in the world. 21 is when you become what I’ve always thought was a “proper” adult.

And thus here I sit, in front of my laptop, making myself start on my twenty blog before I turn twenty one, and before another year of my life dances by without record. I think, though, that now is the right time to start writing again. It’s “Summer” at the moment, despite the fact that I have enjoyed a lovely, lively fire almost every night since I got back to Zimbabwe nearly a month ago. It’s been a bit of shock, slipping into a life of leisure after almost nine months of school. I bought a literal hand-luggage-suitcase-ful of books back home, none of them scholarly, and how many have I finished reading? None. Not a single one! I think that having to read snippets of a minimum of three intriguing, LONG, heavy Directed Studies books nearly every single week for such a long time has pretty much numbed the receptors that are usually so excitable in my imaginative reading mind. I have a wonderful variety of books to choose from: re-reading the classic Pride and Prejudice, which I love, and which I will probably write about in the near future - if I read it, shelf upon shelf of poetry books, an entire list of a friend's favourite books, the vast expanse of online books, a biography about a fascinating guy (information I gleaned about three weeks ago from the foreword and the first chapter of the book) and another book about the history of Zimbabwe. Can you guess which one I am attempting to read, with no inducement whatsoever? 

The history book.

Honestly. What has Yale done to me? And you know something else I never thought I would ever think, say, or feel? I ENJOY school. Those are three words you have probably not heard above ten times in your lifetime. I mean, yes, junior school was fun, and sport in high school was great, and it's not that I didn't enjoy being at school, or learning, or exploring my mind. But there was an omnipresent sense of school being more of a one-off journey, with a definite and glorious end in sight, similar to how some people portray the idea of dying: walking towards the bright light (of Heaven, one hopes). But right here, right now, I don't want school to end. It's wonderful to come back home, and to be on holiday, and to do nothing for a while, but for some undefinable reason, or no, actually, many completely definable reasons, I am just as excited to go back to Yale!

I
am
excited
to...

go back to school.

And you know what? I'm glad that's how it is. I'm delighted that I have finally learnt to feel like that. I'm slightly, fabulously giddy. I hope that everyone choosing a college or preparing for the next step in their life has the opportunity to choose a place where they truly wholly and completely want to be. I think that is something that being at Yale has really taught me is that
life is not about fitting into the worlds other people create for themselves. A lovable livable life is a patchwork creation made by YOU. You have the power to choose and use all the beauty and worth and love in everyone else's worlds, and stitch it all together in your own. And the best part about making a mismatched, unpretentious, realistic quilt of life like this is that it can be shared with everyone and anyone. If your quilt was only orange, and only one shade of orange, then how could you expect someone who detests the colour orange to find anything to value or appreciate in a solely orange quilt? You are not simply monotonous and dull. God didn't make you like that! You're vibrant and changeable and indestructibly individual. And you have the power to make the quilt of your life exactly how you want to!

That was a bit of a ramble, but I suppose if there isn't a precise topic, then it doesn't matter does it?

I think my quilt has lots of different colours, because I love different people who are all so different, and I like to think that I have been able to absorb some of their specific radiances, and add them to my life. Or maybe the world is just one gigantic patchwork quilt, and we all share different patches and colours and stitches. Who knows.

One thing I do actually know (or do I? Can we really ever know anything? Socrates has much to say about that!) One thing I *think* I know is that being at Yale has made me realise everything I just wrote. It's not that I was in a class called "Patchwork: the new Network", or "How to sew your life" or anything like! Rather, I have been exposed to such a variety of humans. I can't stop thinking about how wonderful it is that we, even as buried deep as we are in all our difference and strangeness and discord, are still somehow all human.

So there it is. The start of my twentieth year blog! 339 days until I'm twenty-one. 339 days to fill up and overflow with life!