On our evening walk recently, I saw someone looked remarkably like P from my college days - or like P might look now decades later. She had been quite the character even back then, unwilling to be like anyone else in any way. P was the ultimate in uniqueness - there was no one quite like her. She had no real friends but plenty of fans and haters.
Folks like me who did not care enough to be either were a rarity so she took a special interest in our type. Perhaps she was trying to understand why we did not respond one way of the other to the thing that was P. So anyway, upon returning home I Googled P to see what she is up to these days. She has become an executive coach with a religious guru flair. As many of us predicted even back in the day, P has remained single.
Our collective hypothesis was that she was too caught up in her uniqueness to dilute it with partnership - that would imply some level of equivalence with someone. That would simply not work for her. I listened to one of her motivational talks and was amazed by how little she had changed over the years. She looks a bit older but everything else including the talking points could have been what we heard from her in the dining hall all those years ago.
We had an executive coach in our midst and didn't even know. P is the second kid I went to college with that has turned out to be some kind of guru. The other was my room-mate for a couple of years. L is now teaching other women how to bring their whole selves to home and work. Like P, L is still very close to the person I knew in my late teens. It made me wonder if in order to wind up a guru one needed to possess some Peter Pan like quality. Based on that, I anticipate my class will produce another half dozen gurus in the next decade.
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