Nobody in our neighbourhood had passed grade ten. There was no one to ask about a syllabus, no one who had sat the examinations I was preparing for, and no particular reason for anyone to expect that I would be the first.
The absence of a template
When nobody around you has done a thing, you do not know how long it is supposed to take, or what a reasonable amount of effort looks like, or which parts are meant to be hard.
So I over-studied. I put in hours that my classmates found faintly absurd, for examinations that were still months off, because I had no way of calibrating what was enough. That inefficiency turned out to be the single most useful thing about my position.
A strange kind of freedom
Low expectations are usually described as a burden. In my experience they cut both ways.
When nothing is expected of you, nothing you attempt is out of turn. There was no family trade I was failing to continue and no standard I was falling short of. Every result I brought home was, by definition, unprecedented — and that is a much easier climate to try things in than one where you are expected to do well.
The animal nobody was keeping
The donkey in the Gospel was not chosen for its strength or its breeding. It was chosen because it was there and it was willing to carry Him.
I have never wanted a better description of a vocation than that. Not the best-qualified candidate; the one that was standing nearby and did not object to being untied.
What I would say to the boy
That the absence of anyone to ask is not the same as the absence of help, and that it took me an embarrassingly long time to work out the difference.
I had no one in the house who could explain a syllabus. I had, from the age of seven, someone I had asked to guide me anyway. Those are not the same kind of help, and I would not have swapped the second for the first.