Hear this...

I happened to be on the subway this morning when it was overrun with kids.

After 25 I lost count as well as the free seat next to me...and gained a bashed knee, scuffed shoe and a series of giggles and stupid looks.

They must have been around grade 6 or 7. I didn't know where they were going, and their teachers seemed less than worried about their behavior. Guess they've done this before. Hell, for me as a kid, the subway would have been a formidable opponent...but then again I'm not from 'round these parts', as the saying goes.

While I sat there, listening to my iPod and pretending children weren’t swarming me, a few observations popped into my head.

Mostly, I realized how your place in life is sometimes a nearly consistent thing. There were the dominating boys personalities, laughing loudly and smashing about like the heterosexual numbskulls they most likely are. The bitchy girls who stood in a clique near the door, talking and laughing cattily while casting glances out to the crowd. There were the quiet ones...oh, how I know about the quiet ones...who sat politely, observing their surroundings, drinking in the scene.

The kid that sat next to me was the token, slightly-chunky kind. Not to trivialize him with the label 'token', but that's what it seemed at first.

While I watched them interact, I got the sense as I have many times recently, that these kids were pretty much set in their life positions. Sure, we grow and change, and occasionally break out of the mould, but think about yourself. Weren't you more or less the same person then as you are now (albeit possibly happier now that you're older and above all that)?

During the Christmas break I had the good fortune to spend time with people from High School that I had not been with for some time. While we were sitting around the pub tables (not cafeteria tables anymore, thank you) I noticed how really nothing had changed. The ditzy girl, the one who like to be dramatic, the quite one, the agreeable one...they were all the same. The boys, too, had not changed, some still too hot under the collar, others mellow and friendly and all too agreeable.

It struck me during all of this, as well as this morning, that we must really have almost everything set into our brains at a very young age, and just read off the same sheet for the rest of life. The circumstances may be different, and our responses at time surprising even to us, but ultimately when left alone, unchallenged, we fill the same rolls as we did in elementary school and beyond.

Not that this is a depressing thing, or should be taken in a bad way. It's just an observation I've made over the past few months, in repeated circumstances with repeated different groups of people, that seems to reiterate my findings.

Of course, I look at myself. Just today, I was hanging out in a professor's office, talking about school and his retirement and how time goes by. At one point he looked at me so sincerely, in a way that I sometimes used to be addressed by important teachers in my life, with his eyes open and honest. "You've really grown these past few years," he said. "You're a lot more comfortable. It's good, I see good things for you."

It was nice to hear, actually very well timed too. I had been thinking lately that maybe I wasn't on the right track. I used to get pep talks like that every now and then from teachers I respected, and they meant a lot because it takes more than a friendly word to earn my respect. This man today is probably the single most important professor I've had in university, and to hear him telling me his honest opinion felt wonderful.

I made this argument that we don't really change from our set positions, then I naturally exempt myself from my own opinions. But I'd make the argument that actually I fill the same role as I did in high school and elementary school, more or less. I still feel like a bit of an outcast, never quite sure why I'm not in the popular, social group. I'm smarter than most, to put it bluntly, and though we all say it's a quality that we admire, the bottom line is it does differentiate you from others, and not always to your benefit.

But I feel like I've grown from that scared boy in grade 6, changed. Of course I have...we all do...but I see moments where I think, "This wouldn't have been me, my response, at other times in life."

I wanted to pull out my earphones on the subway, turn to this kid beside me and look him in the eye. I wanted to pass on something, anything that would ease his burden in life. But what would my message be? What could I say that would make him feel better, to ease him onto what I would believe is the right track?

Of course I kept my earphones on, and the kids got off a few stops later. I gave a glance to my seat-mate as he walked through the doors, a little behind everyone else. Things started to come to me.

"Take life at your speed," would be my first piece of advice. "Don't let anyone push you to do things you're not ready for. But keep an open mind, and when you're ready, dive in headfirst. You will look back on this awkwardness and see how much you've changed for the better, and how it really didn't matter. Be yourself, grow within yourself, and just learn to let go."

That was what I decided my brilliant stream of advice, heartfelt to the core, would have been. Because I believe it, when I look back in my mind at the person I was.

But if that's true, then why can I not look past the awkwardness of my life today?