What to do with this knowledge
I booked the full-workup physical (with bonus fitness test and “BodPod” assessment) because, as I told the charming and helpful medical professionals, I wanted to get back into riding my bike(s) at speeds that scare me slightly.
But also, as I did not tell the charming and helpful medical professionals, I like passing exams.
When I was in undergrad, I was very into passing exams while also trying to casually take over the student media organizations with some similarly up-for-it friends and frenemies. I stacked my weeks with classes in international law (human rights and humanitarian), political philosophy, and all things related to theories of international relations.
I thought, I was convinced, I’d find a way to do Good Things for The People. When I wasn’t considering working for FIFA (we shall never speak of this again); or trying to get an internship at the United Nations; or becoming an IP lawyer who would defend indigenous knowledge; or flirting with management consulting (what can I say, those recruiters talked an excellent game). I passed my exams. I didn’t do any of those things.
Fast word (some) years and I think about the arguments with my classmates about realism vs cosmopolitanism vs communitarianism (not to be confused with communism, though of course we yelled about that too). I remember the animated discussions about human rights in a time of asymmetrical warfare. I remember being convinced that we, so young and righteous and bright and self-absorbed, would find a better way. Would we find and fulfill the mission of our generation? Of course we would. We had never yet failed.
Fast forward (some) years, and I find myself having similar, if less ardent, conversations in a classroom with colleagues. We’d all been marked by failure and compromise. We’d all mostly jettisoned the conviction that we would be the ones who would find the better way. We’re not human rights lawyers! We work in marketing! But nor were we entirely ready to betray the mission, come obscurity or darkness.
It is only ever too late when the last of us has ceased to believe.
Attribution:
What to do with this knowledge that our living is not guaranteed?
Perhaps one day you touch the young branch
of something beautiful. & it grows & grows
despite your birthdays & the death certificate,
& it one day shades the heads of something beautiful
or makes itself useful to the nest. Walk out
of your house, then, believing in this.
Nothing else matters.
— from Elegy by Aracelis Girmay