Non-Linear

My education has never been as linear as they hoped,
as linear as they offered it, more a wandering journey
following flickers of light than a textbook. Nothing
going according to the plan yet somehow
providing results, degrees, and certificates, never on time,
never in the right order, a thing to be chased
according to my enthusiasms and fate,
as if determined to be the last of the great generalist,
filled with just enough to see patterns, and never enough
to be an expert anywhere. That would not satisfy most,
but for my skip-along mind, it seems perfect, more so now
that I am long out of schools and rules and how you do it
matters less than the ability to leap from topic to topic
and see the threads we all dance on each day,
even if do not know how fragile it all is, fragile
and yet, somehow resilient, with more paths to our dreams
than we ever imagined.

About this poem

As a small child, I was smart but infuriating, never good at rules. Fortunately, the older I have gotten, the less the rules seem to matter. I can’t wait to be 100.

Tom