A padawan braid is a mark.
A mark, almost, of ownership. A sign you made it. You were accepted.
Sure, it makes for a bizarre hairstyle, but the small satisfaction you feel as a padawan, watching that braid grow, seeing it mark the years of dedication and work...
Fashion be damned. Most of us wouldn't trade that braid for all the credits Hutts hoard.
The braid goes from a stubby thing that barely clears your ear...
To a long line that trails down your chest.
A visible reminder.
It also makes for a handy leash if you get smart with your master or fellow padawans.
Mine is almost too my waist.
I've spent over half my life as a padawan learner. Close to eleven years. I've worn my hair shorn since I was just past my twelth birthday. When she chose me as her apprentice.
She had her doubts. I was not an easy person.
Gifted -- cursed actually -- with the Sight, I was not the most pliable child. The visions had come to me all my life. They drove me to do. To be a certain way.
It was a responsibility. A burden more than a gift.
Such is the lot for Seers.
Add to that empathy and you can see why it almost landed me at the Healers Temple.
I was often confused as a child. Driven to bouts of depression by what I'd seen and felt. The Training Masters did their best to guide me, but it was like slapping a bandage over a festering wound.
My friends kept me sane. Grounded.
They had their own demons.
We were all raised in the Temple. Brought to the creche as infants. It's an odd parallel that children riased in the Jedi Temples are some of the most loving, trusting children to be found. We're also driven, hungry to please, strong-minded and flexible.
We are what they raise us to be.
Jedi.
Not all of us make it though.
The stress on an adolescent, wondering and waiting to be chosen as a padawan, is unbelievable.
All your life, you've prepared for this. Anticipated it. Longed for, dreamed of it.
If you're not chosen by your thirteenth birthday, you're sent to AgriCorps or the Healer Temple.
Bewildering. Crushing.
Have you failed your training as a student if you're not chosen? After all, are you not a product of the Temple? They shaped you, formed you in your body, mind and soul...
But if you are not accepted as a padawan, you're out.
*That* is the harsh truth.
It's necessary. Or so says my master. To keep the Jedi strong, you must weed out the weak.
My heart bled for my friends who did not make it, even as I rejoiced in being chosen.
The guilt is incredible.
What did I do that was different? Some of them were smarter, had better scores than I. Some were more physically gifted, performing amazing feats of acrobatics. Some were stronger mentally.
Why me? What did she see in me that prompted her to cull me from the herd?
My master doesn't appreciate it when I think this way. I am no cull to her she says.
Perhaps. But I am like the miniature trees some of the older Knights tend and prune so carefully. Shaped to grow a certain way, to fit a certain purpose.
I do not resent it. For all of the breaking down, there is building up. True, there are times Jedi calmness chafes me.
Serenity has never come easy to me.
Something looms on the horizon.
I have watched it approaching for years. Every year, it gets murkier and murkier...not clearer. I think I saw clearer as a child.
I know what it is though.
Change.
Will the Jedi survive?
I do not know.
I see many possible futures, none of them clear.
There will be no avoiding this though. The force is not something we wield and shape to our wills.
We bend to it's directives.
We are supposed to, at any rate.
Lately I think we've bent more to the political directives than anything.
Guardians of the peace, we have become mired in the politics of the Republic. The Council walks a fine line in trying to steer us clear.
Don't they hear it?
The Republic is dying.
Decaying from the inside out.
I reach out to twine my braid around my hand, and allow the security it always brings to soothe me.
False security, no doubt. But it is enough.
For now.
What of when the braid is severed? When I am cut free of the symbol that marks me as an apprentice?
What then will be my security?
The force is my ally. The one true constant in my life. All else changes, but it does not.
I almost envy my yearmates who were sent to AgriCorps or the Healers.
Almost.
I stand, my knees protesting at the movement after so long kneeling in meditation.
Change.
Inevitable. Unstoppable.
I must be like a reed in the wind and bend...
..or be broken.
Closing my eyes, I open myself to feel the pulse of the Temple. Peace balanced with striving.
An odd combination, but one that is the Jedi.
Who I am.
Feeling again like that initiate who desperately wanted to be accepted, I decide to seek my master.
Do I seek validation?
Don't we all?
That's what this braid that marks me as a Jedi padawan is all about.
Will it be grown to my feet before I'm ready for my Trials?
Days there are it seems so.
So, like the child I was, still am, I scurry for the safety of my master's arms. There, I know, *know*, nothing can harm me. It is my one safe place.
It will not always be.
But for now...
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