To Be the Student
By Lex Krowley
I loathed to be the student.
I hated the ignorance, despised the toil, detested the tedium and status of child.
I berated exhaustion, scowled at command.
I can’t say how often I longed for time to stand
Still
When I loathed to be the student.
And how I pleaded for control of the day, wished for “mastery” in all I could say,
For an end of this work so endless, meaningless, pointless, purposeless, pale with lack of potential and pitiful for patented boredom.
Oh, how I loathed to be the student.
Tears were seeping as I was weeping when I shouted to the universe:
“I have clawed my way up unyielding granite with pain as payment and time as crying sacrifice to what?
Where has it brought me?
Why am I still the hateful student?”
And something in time and space must have been listening to what I was saying and got fed up with my complaining and how I was behaving.
But the response wasn’t sagely advice, a peek at the dice, or a warning to play nice lest I pay some price.
No, this universal something had a wicked sense of humor.
So instead, I was allowed to stop being the student.
What’s past that door? What’s past the learning?
I’ll give you a hint: it’s not yearning or concerning or burning, or turning to vice and avarice; it’s not wonder or blundering or thunder and sundering
And it’s definitely not drive or a sense of being alive; it’s not “mastery” or blasphemy or love or even a sense of above and below.
Do you want to know?
It’s nothing.
It’s a place that maybe once upon a time stood between good and evil and reason and rhyme,
And under a few layers of drivel.
And now, it’s nothing.
It’s nowhere, no one, no place, and never
The greatest void that ever
Could be
Lies in the place
Where you are no longer the student.
It’s a place of careless arrogance, apathetic inheritance, and irreverence that takes away all evidence of any dream you’ve ever dared to conceive
And drags it and you into a well to hell where you will be held and will never stop falling.
It’s a place with everything to learn
Never in your reach.
That is what it is to stop being the student.
So I’ll have pride in being humble, in having strides and occasional stumbles
In having errors and triumphs of all conflicts and forms,
In making mistakes that will adorn
My life
Forever.
I’ll learn from the past, the present, the portent
The binding fates and the unbound future
From equal minds to unequal rules,
From written words to spoken truths
From lie to fiction and myth to magic,
The slyest trick and all that is tragic
From ordered lessons to the orders of chaos.
I will find my teachers in the world material, seek mentors in knowledge ethereal,
And, greatest of all, find mastery through my own striving ephemeral existence.
And I will suffer for it.
There will be tiresome tasks, tasteless times, and tuneless talkers.
But I’ll risk it.
Because the truth isn’t that you will always
Be the student.
The truth is that, if you’re smart, you will never stop wanting to be.
And I’d rather be learning.