A more realistic look: The best thing in the world August 8, 2008
Posted by Sharny in : Essay, Life, Ramble , trackbackIn case you hadn’t guessed, this post is a follow up to my last post “The best thing in the world“. My idea here is to look at it in a more realistic way, to look at the problems associated with it, what might stop it from coming true etc.
First of all, it’s important to note that I wouldn’t have produced a post on something I knew to be impossible to happen. I’d love to be able to fly but I’m not gonna dedicate much time to that because it’s never really gonna happen, unless they invent some kind of commercial jet pack type system.
Given that I need some kind of way of working through the different things I’ll start at now and move forward.
The underlying realism is of course, everything here assumes that at least the majority of us stay friends. As it was pointed out to me, it’s very unlikely the group will look exactly the same in future years but at the same time it’s pretty unlikely that it will look all that different either. The same person that pointed that out also pointed out that we are at a prime point in our lives to make lifelong bonds and the evidence that is possible is all around. One post I have yet to write will perhaps look at that a bit further.
So, Road Trip ‘09. Overall looks quite good, we should have a decent number of drivers by then and a few cars to boot. The only real issue comes to parental consent, which for most of us isn’t a big problem but it only takes one person to mean we can’t do something because we’re not gonna be leaving anyone out. I’m pretty confident we can get around this issue one way or another, even if it does require some pretty heavy bargaining. It also requires a certain amount of general planning which will most likely be left to just a couple of people but this is nothing too difficult. We can get through it, I’m sure.
Then comes Ski ‘09/2010/2011. The dates are a bit vague because we’re not entirely sure whether we would require everyone to be 18 before we could pull it off. Again, this is basically a parental thing but understandably taking people into Europe is substantially more difficult in bargaining terms. Although actually, it could be easier organization wise. The idea is to get some kind of package holiday, probably with a chalet, and lets face it, package holidays are pretty simple things. That’s the beauty of them, everything is pretty much sorted for you. Originally I had worried that some people might not be too keen on going but so far results from the Sideroom Survey show a great deal of support for the idea of a ski trip and convincing the unbelievers shouldn’t be too hard.
Hurdles of the next few years. The most obvious particular hurdle is the university one. Although I chose to go to Nottingham to stick with the band and with my friends, Nottingham was where I had my eye on for a long time anyway and it is a pretty good university. Top lists puts it near the number 10 in the country, so getting in there is definitely something to be proud of. Of course, we don’t know until I have my results that I am actually gonna get in there. Anyway, the point is that the others in the group that will likely go to university may not want to/be able to go to Nottingham or Nottingham Trent. There are other reasonably local choices though so it shouldn’t be disaster but it’s a point in the future where there is potential for trouble.
The next hurdle comes at the end of university, when our freshly degreed up comrades go out into the world to look for work. This search for work could indeed drive them accross the country, or even potentially to different countries entirely. It depends entirely on who goes where doing what exactly what we’ll do about this. There is basically no planning that can be done, other than to be aware of it’s existence and to sort of know that 5 or 6 years from now is a critical point in our friendship.
University has the added hurdle of a whole new friendship group that will mean time split between the new people and us old reliables. I hope that everyone will understand this, it’s likely to happen to all of us (as long as we do something, if some of us never get jobs and just leech at home then they are gonna suffer from this and never really benefit) and that we can still use the crew as something of unloosable friends, even if we don’t have all that much time for maintenance of those friendships. Still, I imagine we can handle that, given that our beginnings are based in something that has a long distance element.
Then there’s gap year excursions, which are a possibility for many of us and could put a bit of stress on things. Not too bad though, I would think it wouldn’t be too challenging.
Once we’re through all that, the risk is simply that we may have been dragged too far accross the country for reasons of work, work of significant other, family or something I haven’t thought of to really enact quite what we were thinking of. I don’t think by any means we’d stop being friends, really, if we get past all that then I doubt there would be much short of illicit affairs that could pull us apart.
Despite all this, I remain optimistic. In fact, there isn’t anything there that is too difficult to overcome, my idea here was simply to recognise the difficulties ahead so that I (and anyone else of us that reads this) can be a bit more prepared.
It’s an interesting life we’ve got ahead of us…
Tagged as: Essay, Friends, Future, Hope, Life, Nottingham, Ramble, Work
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