Life seems to consist of very long ploddy thick tracks and then suddenly, usually when you least expect it, tiny thin unexpected furrows that you couldn’t have seen or predicted you would suddenly turn 90 degrees and head down.
I assume some few folk only ever experience the long thick ploddy tracks. I guess in some ways I am a little jealous of them, missing out on the anguish of the sudden turns.
Definitely, however, most people find their life taking a sudden unexpected major turn maybe once or twice. And, of course, there are those who never manage to get onto the thick steady tracks, welded to a confused and exhausting life of skating uncontrollably across many different tracks.
My own life, which I am very aware has so little left compared to the amount I have lived, has been reasonably full of those suddenly appearing and out of control, out of expectation tangential twists and turns. At various times in my life just as I thought I knew the direction I was headed in, who I finally was, and that maybe it was time to calm down, to settle down, to be the person in the long ploddy thick track I was now shuffling forward in, suddenly things would change. Sometimes it was my fault. Sometimes it was somebody else’s fault. Sometimes it was nobody’s fault.
However, a lot, well most, of my life has been kind of wasted heading in directions, travelling in what I naively thought was ‘forward’, only to discover was not to be a real forward. Not a forward for me. Lordy what a waste.
One of the things that only with the benefit of hindsight that I learned was that you never know everything. You are never ‘there’. You never ‘arrive’.
Heh. I got to 15 and I knew everything. I had it all sussed. All those years of being a child were behind me now.
Hell. Then suddenly I was 20. Wow, what a prat I’d been at 15. How embarrassing. But I was there now. All sussed.
What’s this? 25? Wow, was I really that moronic back when I was 20? But at least I now had it all sussed.
30. Yep, arsehole when I was 25. Hmmm.
40. 50. 60. Possibly nothing changes. And maybe now I know you never actually get it all sussed, and despite all manner of self-analysis, you’ll always be a prat in somebody’s eyes. You’ll always have done something wrong that you can’t ever fix.
Life is easier in so many ways now. Finally, I’m not trying to reach an unknown goal, just enjoying the journey, happy to accept the long ploddy tracks or the unexpected furrows that interrupt them until I no longer exist. Heh heh. Maybe I’ve got it all sussed?
The one regret is that it’s extremely hard to try to explain any of this to somebody who is 15. Or 20. Or 25. Old people don’t speak the same language as young people. There’s a circuit inside the younger mind that translates anything useful into annoying white noise. I never heard the old people around me as they tried to warn me or describe the tracks and furrows of their own lives.
Nobody will hear me. Well, except others facing their final leg of the journey and knowing exactly what I’m talking about.
Maybe it’s because we are all just supposed to experience life’s exciting journey of thick tracks and intersecting furrows for ourselves.
England's England 