How was your first day of school? (you're still there)

I just knew somehow it was going to be a very special day. I was all smartly dressed in a khaki uniform, cap and sandals, and a shiny leather satchel was slung over my back. Decades later, I remember looking at the photo, recalling the scents of leather, well-scrubbed teeth and a hint of peanut butter sandwiches sidling out my satchel. My face was grinning up at my dad as I stood in some garden of a forgotten home in Durban in 1969.

First day of school, five-and-a-half-years old. Remember how important that “and-a-half” was? The memory takes me back to the last day of being in the “baby room” of nursery school. I remember toddling around the prams and looking at babies as I was by then constantly clambering out of mine and after a few days of that mischief I was taken by the hand and escorted across to “big” school where all the kids walked and even ran. Running was new, exciting: the colours of trees, walls and children blurred until I fell and grazed my knees. I kissed my first girl shortly thereafter (boys’ legs were made so one can walk over to girls and smooch without invitation or permission) and I still remember her name: Sarah. No, not Sarah Britten.

But now nursery school was “little” school and “big” school was a primary school in Durban (a school which closed down shortly after and I can’t remember the name). Now I had to have stuff like my very own satchel, smelling of leather and polish, into which was placed fresh-smelling exercise books, a Noddy & Big Ears tin case with pens, pencils, rubber and sharpener inside, and, most intriguing, a lunch box stuffed with peanut-butter sandwiches. I found it fascinating to have my lunch shoved into a box instead of being put on a plate. I remember pretending to be Neil Armstrong on the moon eating my sarmies at break time. The astronauts, to my mind, ate everything out of little boxes.The odours of a classroom: soaped bodies, minted stationery, wood … and then one boy, for some reason beyond me, was escorted to the front of our class and was told to bend over facing the class. He got his bum thwacked with a ruler in front of girls and boys and I remember promising myself never to let that happen. That promise was thoroughly broken many times. On that first day of school I remember doing a lot of running around and my school textbook for the term, John meets Jane, or a title to that effect, had been read before I got home. Somehow I had managed to learn to read before big school.

In life one always seems to be going from “little school” to “big school”. Then high school is big school, the army (compulsory in those days) became big school, then university, and then the “real” world of work which none of all that schooling really prepared you for. Then it was dealing with the “big schools” of being jobless, making a success of being in one company, but then the company liquidated. Boy, that was a big school: two months behind on nearly every payment, including the credit card and the bond on the apartment. The phone was ringing every day and I was amazed by my sudden popularity with Standard Bank and First National. Then it was the big school of running my own business, a franchise, the big school of finally screwing that up and starting all over again. Then I ran my very own business, as exciting and fresh as that first school satchel with its mysterious, boxed contents worthy of a Buzz Aldrin. And, suddenly, things became so ho-hum as, it seems, there were no big schools left to walk through the gates of, slowly master, and finally become too big for the premises.

Having a new big school to try out is scary but at least it is always interesting and you are growing. I have realised in life that, like nature, either one is growing or stagnating, which really is dying. Nature does not seem to have a middle ground, does she?

Now my big school is finding a country to live in and “crack”, make a success of. When leaving your own country you perhaps don’t realise you take your citizenship and natural rights for granted. Rights like being entitled to work without a permit or come and go when you want to. Getting into New Zealand, even though we are “entitled” to be sponsored in now by the family there and get permanent residence is a fair amount of paperwork. Yep, unless your labour skills are in short supply, you don’t just walk into another country. That has proven to be quite a scary, big school learning curve, me not belonging to a country. China has been the “waiting room” between countries and has proven to be a long and most interesting waiting room — nearly five years at this time of writing. But China only became really fascinating when I no longer perceived it as a waiting room.

Which brings me to the subject of waiting. Life is not a waiting room. I would love to add up how much time we spend waiting for something to happen: from school tuck-shop queues to bank and shopping queues. From waiting for the school bell to ring to waiting to hear the outcome of something really important, even a watershed, in your life, like getting approved by New Zealand immigrations so we can take advantage of the house we bought with the family who are there in Auckland — that investment was half our life savings. So we are at times quite anxious for that waiting period to end.

But surely the way to live life shouldn’t be, “are we there yet”?

Endless waiting creates enormous strain. It is as if the now is something that is an obstacle, a nuisance, to where we want to get to. That surely ages us. I have learned that the now is really all there is. This is not armchair philosophy: the future is not real except as imagined outcomes and the past can only be as we remember it, not as it was.

One of the most exhilarating moments of my life was suddenly finding myself alone with an old army duffle bag somewhere between Rhodes University and Port Elizabeth at the start of a student vacation. My friend Pete Marx clattered off in his old VW Beetle, waving me goodbye. Suddenly I felt weightless, detached, un-bogged down with material “stuff” and responsibilities. There was just the still air and the hushed trees, the leaves like shoals of fish, teeming with possibility. I was there, now, present to the moment. As Seamus Heaney, in a different context, wrote: ” …then once I felt the air / I was like turned turf in the breath of God …”

That is when every waking moment is truly a big school, alive with awe: we actually are, and this moment, the now, is as bubbly as children’s antics and laughter on a playground.