For me the trip aroused ghosts. I don’t often talk about my past and any future biographer (dream on!) may well be delighted by the factual crumbs I here present. Due to some obscurity in our local education rules I went to secondary school at the age of 10 and was thus a year younger than almost everybody else. The school I went to (Hutton Grammar School) was well over an hour’s journey away and I used to leave the house at seven in the morning and get back after five. I did very badly in the first few years and managed to find myself on Headmaster’s Report for poor performance. In hindsight, I was simply exposed to too much, too early. It is symptomatic of what Hutton was that no one spotted the problem. (Mind you it did have two good biology teachers and an excellent geographer to whom I owe considerable and lasting debts. The RE teacher, by contrast, was a sadistic liberal brute whose violent temper was such that everybody was very scared of him.)
Anyway, by Sixth Form I had begun to master my problems and was showing academic promise. When my A level results came out they were extremely good but by then it was all too late and I ended up at Sheffield. I now realise that this had (with some minor exceptions in the staff) a truly lousy Geology Department. Indeed when, a number of years later, I came to lecture on Geology in Beirut I found there were some very fundamental elements of the subject that were a profound novelty to me. Here ends the history lesson.
Anyway you can imagine that, last week, I often found myself often wondering ‘What if?’. What if that warm August day in 1971 when I went in for my results, some discerning teacher had said ‘Hey why not come back for a third year and try for Oxford or Cambridge?’? One of the problems of being a fantasy writer – perhaps it is a just punishment for aspiring to write in such a genre – is that we can create our own alternative life scenarios all too easily. We ask, all too often, ‘what if?’ and imagine the alternatives.
Now that, dear friends, is one of my own ‘what-might-have-been’ or ‘road-not-taken’ moments. It is a somewhat peculiar (and intellectually snobbish) one but I suspect most of us have something similar. The job we could’ve taken; the guy or girl we should have asked out for a date; the tough decision we flunked. And so on….
I suspect there are a lot of things that could be said about this and I would be grateful for sane and spiritual comments. Let me list some observations of my own.
- We rarely, if ever, know that the road not taken would have been the better road. I might not have enjoyed Oxford or Cambridge or I might have become even more intellectually arrogant than I am… (apparently blog writing is a sign of intellectual arrogance) and so on.
- We cannot live our lives looking backwards: you can never drive a car successfully if you constantly peer in the rear-view mirror. The issues I have are not what I might have done in 1971 but what I will do in July 2009.
- Regret is a poisonous diet. It can sour all that we were, all that we are and all will be. A disappointment is unfortunate; but to have it wreck the rest of our lives is to turn a disappointment into a disaster.
- This sort of view (like greed, which it resembles) is insatiable: life could always have been better. After all I did go to university and eventually got a PhD! Isn’t that enough?
- A specifically Christian perspective is that we are told that this world is not all that there is. It is at best a brief preparation for eternity. Everything ultimately is to be judged in the light of eternity. That is what really counts.
