On Age and Shame.

When I was younger I paid little heed to old people because they seemed too degraded to be of much use for anything. I paid even less to babies because they could offer nothing useful at all. I could tolerate young children because they could be cute, or at least interesting in one way or another, but I still saw them as a separate species. I’d fallen into that state of mind, you see, which I suspect most of us do – the state of mind where we judge age in egocentric terms:

I am twenty eight years old. I can climb mountains, play rugby, walk thirty miles a day in rugged country, swim for hours against a strong current, and move heavy objects around without breaking a sweat. I know this because I’ve done all these things. So if I see somebody drowning in a fast-moving river, I have the strength and stamina to rescue them. If I see a child run into the road, I can move swiftly enough to retrieve them before the vehicle arrives. If I need to escape from some upper floor of a burning building, I have the agility to climb down a series of knotted sheets with ease. I am at the perfect age to be a fully functional member of the species. It is a proper age and I hold a valid place within that species.

And this carries the inevitable corollary that those who fail these tests don’t have a valid place within it. Dystopian stories and other fantasies have been written around this very theme.

But I see it differently now that I fail them myself. Now I have become endlessly aware of life as a conveyor belt carrying us inexorably from the uselessness of babyhood to the dysfunctional state of old age. (I’m reminded of the eponymous Lucy saying in the film: ‘Without time we can’t exist’, even though I’m not entirely sure exactly how it relates to the fundamental point.) I suppose I’m saying that I have come to regard all ages as being equal in a manner of speaking, which is surely the right way to see it.

But do you know what? I’m still so critically aware of that glorious quarter of a century of life between the mid-teens and end of the thirties that I can’t shake the nagging sense of shame that I can no longer contribute as I once could. I don’t hold with the notion that old people automatically contribute wisdom to the prosecution of life, because I don’t believe it’s wholly true for reasons which I’ve already committed to this blog. And what value does wisdom offer anyway, especially at a time when young people seem to derive most of their guidance from peer groups on social media?

And so the ultimate question remains: Do I still have a place here, and do I have any right to hold the respect of those who are still fully functional members of the species? I think it probably isn’t my place to answer that.