Two Models for Living.

I woke up this morning with an enervating sense of betrayal. I was convinced that I’d been led into a trap from which there was no escape but death. It stayed with me for some time. I tried to remember my dreams in search of an explanation, but I could only recall small fragments and none of them fitted. Except, perhaps, the last one.

It was very brief, showing me an imagined scene from an old iconic British TV series called The Avengers. The background was hazy and appeared to show a melee of Mrs Peel and some kids, apparently unclothed for some odd reason, tending their hair. In the sharper foreground sat John Steed in his trademark suit and bowler, staring back at me with his equally trademark look: calm and unemotional, but always carrying some subtle meaning.

Steed was the ultimate self-contained individual, crushingly debonair and sophisticated. He was James Bond without the sexual edge, for he was beyond anything as tawdry as a cheap sexual dimension. He rose to every challenge easily and naturally, and the secret of his superiority was the fact that he needed nothing and nobody except himself. He was the perfect marriage of intellect, physical ability and unruffled panache.

I wondered where John Steed would be now. How old would he be? Ninety, maybe? Older, probably.

It led me to thinking that there are fundamentally two ways of living a life, short of becoming a monk. First there’s the Standard Model, in which you have adventures whilst young, and then settle down to build a generational pyramid of kids, parents, grandparents and great grandparents. It’s the one most people seem suited to; it’s the safest model because it leads you unerringly to a place where old age is right and comfortable. It provides all the support you need just when you finally come to need it.

And then there’s the Errant Model, in which you never stop seeking adventures. It’s a model in which you constantly move from relationship to relationship, place to place, occupation to occupation, and thrill to thrill. It’s a model which allows no real prospect of settlement, or at least no comfortable one. It’s the hazardous model, because it will most likely lead you to a place of isolation in which you can no longer do the only things you know how. And so the biggest challenge comes towards the end, just when you’re beginning to feel tired.

It goes without saying, of course, that choosing the Errant Model is always inevitable if that’s how you’re made. Choosing the Standard Model would be too big a price to pay for a more comfortable later life. Ironically, it would amount to a form of betrayal.