I often wonder why young people are so idealistic when at university and then become progressively more cynical upon contact with working life. Whilst I do object against blind optimism and naivete, I have seen the souring of ideals firsthand and it's not pretty.
A friend of mine; Teadog, is spending a couple of years in China learning Mandarin. He's mentioned a couple of times how grim and po-faced (my words, not his) the people often look when they are studying or working. It makes me smile because sometimes I think that could have been me. Do Chinese students even have (the luxury of) a post-adolescent idealistic phase?
Possibly idealism and imagination are intertwined. Once, when we had just about finished with secondary school, I was in the car with with Ravi and Meechy. We had stopped at some red lights. 'The lights just turned green,' I said [they hadn't]. 'in a parallel universe,' I clarified. Meechy spluttered as she often used to do when something random happened. I don't know what made me say it. Maybe they really had in another reality.
With Meechy and the gang, we built a little world where we made plans to travel the world by motorcycle, build a space shuttle with material from the scrapyard, and had a superhero called Spoon who would rescue us from creepy people. The point is, the imagination that ran riot when we were young is still colouring my reality a great deal. And I'd like it to stay that way.
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