square peg | Erin's Clishmaclaver

I’ve been doing a fair bit of pondering on this remarkably journey we’re all taking. Each person doing exactly the same thing – living – while at the same time, each doing it in a totally unique way.

In the Western world, there appears to be a set pattern for at least the first 17 years, and that’s school. Lots of it. Pre-school, kindergarten, elementary school, sometimes a middle school for the 6th to 8th grades, then high school. Afterward, many of us go on to university and post-graduate work. Then the jobs, or, for some, the careers.

That’s all well and good; I know several people who traversed the system relatively unscathed and are currently living fulfilling and happy lives.

However, looking back, if I were to speak solely to my own experiences, I’d posit that the established ‘system’ didn’t particularly work for me.

In elementary school, I was a shining star. I was polite and well turned-out, I knew my lessons, had many friends, was active and happy. I loved to be quizzed on what I knew, be that math, spelling, geography, or what-have-you. I drew and wrote constantly. I was going to be a writer, an artist, get married at 24 and have two, perfect children (the paper fortune teller confirmed this). The world was full of promise.

In grade six, I moved to Toronto for the school year. Scared the shit out of me, that did. I continued to write, though; it had become a refuge. The city was unfamiliar, grey, loud and dirty and the kids didn’t like me all that much (except for Max H. and Connie C., without whom I’d never survived, who took me in and introduced me to good music and community). Grade seven brought me back to Burlington, but by then, all of my friends had formed new groups and I spent the next two years feeling like an interloper. I had great hopes for high school, starting fresh.

Ah, yes…high school. While I can’t honestly say it was a torture, I don’t look back on it particularly fondly. I had already begun to lose my way, getting in trouble fairly frequently, my grades suffering, my relationships beginning to appear more than moderately unhealthy. I was intelligent, but bored and unchallenged, and that made my way treacherous. My writing trailed off around then. Yet throughout those years, I’d always maintained this niggling suspicion in the back of my mind that I was destined for better things…and when It came along, I’d know It when I saw It.

Cut to 25+ years later…I’ve been out in the world, I’ve worked, I’ve seen a whole bunch of neat stuff, done a whole bunch of cool things, married, had children. And yet that Itch For The It remains, and I believe much of that is due to a lifelong inkling that I’m the idiomatic square peg attempting to conform to the round hole (at least when it comes to the traditional way of doing things).

I now have a daughter who is a bit of a square peg, herself. I thought of her as I listened to this talk Music And Life by Alan Watts, and realized that her journey is really just starting out, and the paths and possibilities are endless. I have resolved to become far more diligent in reminding her that this journey, this pilgrimage, is a musical thing, and that you’re supposed to sing, or dance your way through it.

In doing so, I hope to remind myself, and perhaps move ever closer to that elusive It.