1 - Thankless Times

Through the endeavours of maturity: for ordinary mortals to bring food to the table and roof over their heads, for many of them to raise children, for others to care about their old folk, for a few just to enjoy and please their partners and friends, the little time amongst the innumerable and forgotten days of a daily grind leave for inner reflection and a chat with ourselves,  to review actions and thoughts, it is in this little time the nostalgia of childhood is rekindled; with its innocence and naivety, its purity and sweetness, its vitality and carefreeness. At this time, we are often overwhelmed by the feeling of missing longed-for past situations: sunny afternoons playing on the dusty streets and sandlots of the old neighborhood, the hot summer holidays by the sea, times and places of joy and carefreeness, when each day we reached new horizons. But the more we long for and miss those, the more we feel the inadequacy to slow down the passing of time, the more they hopelessly fade in our minds until they have become forgotten change in a box. For many, however, nostalgia does not have the attain the same magnitude with the recollections from the years following those of childhood, those of adolescence. It may have to do with the thudding intensity and dull colour of the experiences associated with this age, and a chaotic perception of the world. Perhaps, it has to do with the fact that we come to a better understanding with ourselves via a bumpy and rough road towards the crystallization into whom we finally become.

The review of adolescence, that whirlwind in our inner world, the complex and awkward as much as transformative period for spirit and body, remains very personal and subjective, at least, for an introverted boy, soon to become an ambitious young man, but who was eventually shaped into an inward looking and withdrawn person. I felt adolescence was an almost exclusively esoteric experience, with few occasions and examples of outwardness and externalising thoughts and feelings along its course. It is clearly a period when one develops at a rapid pace, both physically and mentally, conquers higher levels of self-consciousness and begins to perceive through emotional regressions, sometimes severe, one’s becoming and being. As the time gap from adolescence widens, the deeper that period is pushed into the memory banks of the brain and, thereafter, rarely recalled: with its secrets, the feelings of repression, the disorders, and some unhealthy or unsavoury habits. Whenever those memories resurface (and that occurs every time I dig into the being-in-itself, the person I grew up into) that period is projected as disorderly sequence of abrupt hormonal and physiological changes, as an emotional turbulence without a defined cusp, with vague beginnings and undefined ends, not easily affording a rationalisation and correlation with the present. Although paramount in the process of integration as human beings, it rarely becomes a point of reference and barely recognized as one of the foundations on which our life rests. For me and possibly a few others like me, it was in life what the Middle Ages represented in the history of the human kind: a dark, but historically deterministic prelude to the Renaissance. The era when a major chunk of the character and personality is sculpted and painted.

There were the times when oppression by the family environment, as itself formed by preset structures and established dictates of the Greek society of its milieu (because oppression seemed and was intensely felt as such), the weariness of the school and the ordinariness and mediocrity of most of our teachers, the exclusion from wider circles of friends and schoolmates and the joys I saw they could offer, in short, the curtailing of individual freedom, created situations that at times became unbearable to the point of implosion. Compulsions found fertile soil inside the soul, often I found myself stripped out of creative imagination, and dried of creative thinking and feelings; frustrated by unfulfilled desires and the absence of outlets for joy and creation, where passions and repressed desires could be channelled or where some latent talent could be detected and flourish. The result was an ever-increasing inwardness and circular or dead-end thinking, further isolation from the external world of peers and adults, unwarranted hostility towards people around me; all in all, a vicious spiral starting from and ending into myself. There were moments when I felt that I could not claim even a tiny share of the external world around me, that I belonged to it only in nominal terms, an emotionally alienated oddity, a stranger amongst strangers. I had no mates but a family and a room, and a school to go and get educated. For the most part, life revolved around the latter.