To be. Or not.

It's quite an experience, when you sit in a chair facing an interview panel which not only holds the power over allowing to get what you want, but loves to get into friendly conversation with you as well. Irony? It's not been my first time facing such high stakes cloaked in cheerful banter, prefect and council interviews, head-prefect interview, GC, AC interviews. I guess this is different because for once, I was not sure if what the panel had to offer, was what I wanted.

"So why do you want to be fighter pilot?"

"I'm not sure I want to be one." Ouch. You can imagine the stares I was getting for that one. Facing a trained psychologist, 2 senior pilots and a lieutenant colonel, I did as I usually do for interviews, tell the truth. The whole, bloody, stinking truth. And nothing but it. I swear.

And sweat for my answers too. The interviewers were relentless, giving me the rope to hang myself. I guess I was quick enough to tie the lasso and throw it back on them, because surprise surprise, they gave me the letter. With a contract in it, to be a pilot trainee and work with the air force. You would think I'll be jumping for joy, being offered a career before A level results are released. I thought I should too, but look at me now.

Confused, totally and utterly without an idea what the rest of my life should be spent on. I looked at the contract all night in the chalet, and this morning I look at it again with the same feeling. This was a dream come true, that childhood dream which I had not too long ago. But as I told the interview panel, I'm not a child no more. We grow up, we learn that there is such a thing as responsibility, the rose-tinted glasses come off.

I spent the night at Sentosa with the Group, playing Risk and listening the GC debate the same things we did not 2 years ago. They still have the idealism to carry it through, and I envy the innocence they still possess. The old boys were just there to relive old times, when the world was so much simpler, just Scouting and schooling. I look at those faces last night and the guys no longer seemed young and eager as they were when I met them in Secondary Two. But they were just as passionate to get that innocence back. We played and drank the night away, with Risk and stupid dare games and lots of Coke, no beer or alcohol. Just as we had before. We talked and listened, stoned and did lots of thinking. What future to come, what had past, didn't matter because the important moment was the present.

And now, the letter stares me in the face again. The future. What's to come, and I can decide it now. I must.

"The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact, a return to the idealised past."
Robertson Davies