Brief excerpts from Walking On Water: Reading, Writing, and Revolution, by Derrick Jensen, in which Derrick talks to students at a boys boarding school:
“I guess the first thing I wish someone would have told me is that it’s okay to hate school, that it’s really crazy to expect people to sit motionless and to pretend to be interested as you bore them out of their skulls, and it’s even more crazy to expect them to like it.” The boys perked up. So did the administrators, but I suspect for different reasons…
“I wish also that someone would have told me—one hundred times if that was what it took for me to hear it—that it’s okay to be happy, it’s okay to live your life exactly the way you want it. It’s okay to not get a job. It’s okay to never get a job. It’s okay to find what makes you happy and then to fight for it. To dedicate your life to discovering who you are.”
My time was up… A tall, slender boy asked, eagerly, “Does all of this mean we never have to do anything we don’t want? Does it mean it will all be easy?”
“No. It will be very hard. You’ll make a million mistakes, and you’ll pay for them all, one way or another. That’s the only way you learn, or at least it’s the only way I learn. But the hard parts will be your hard parts, they won’t be hard parts other people have imposed on you for their own reasons, or maybe for no reason at all. And your ownership of them—your responsibility to and for them—makes all the difference in the world.”
