“Hold on to the now, the here, through which all future plunges into the past.” Sometimes, it feels like everything that I say to myself has already been said to me by Joyce. If you looked up ‘wide-eyed’ under a picture dictionary that day, you would have seen gaping-mouth-me there. This was Business School. All my Shakespeare-Woolf-Joyce spouting self managed was a small ‘gulp’. This was not my comfort zone, even though it hosted a library. Of the many moments when I had imagined what this would be like, I hadn’t counted on the nervousness. This was like going back to the first day at St. Stephen’s. That had become home. Would this place too? Was I really going to start calling all that I was looking at right now, mine? More importantly, were these shy half-smiles going to translate into nights of hysterical giggles and classes of shared bewilderment? The magic of any ‘space’ lies in its people. Because more intensely than the smell of the grass or the taste of the mess food (not to underestimate either), I feel the people. And I feel books. And I knew that change was inevitable because the touch was to change. My fingers would now leaf through shiny, brightly coloured Management texts and scurry across a black keyboard. Most of the pen and paper would take a back seat and I would (I want to) find new ways of realizing myself.
My room contains the same framed photographs and Bible that I have carried over the years. They bring an interesting old-new flavour to my ‘new’ life.
