Changing Seats.

I was out clearing the grids on the lane again today when I spied a group of young children standing by the gates of the primary school. They were talking and laughing and fooling around while the teachers occupied themselves with the business of ordering and directing matters. And as I watched them it struck me that Shakespeare’s seven ages of man might be distilled to a simpler three.

The first age is the age of the child when your life is mostly ordered and directed by the grown ups who feed and clothe you, and take you to the doctor’s, and pick you up from school, and tell you what time to go to bed, and place you on the back seat of the car to take you on holiday, and keep you safe from the perils of life. And while you’re a child you look up to the grown ups and rely on them to shield you from the cares of the world.

And then you become a grown up yourself and the roles are reversed. You work to bring the pennies in. You drive the car on the way to the coast. You make decisions affecting those in your orbit, giving both advice and orders when such are needed and approval or denial in the face of requests. People rely on you to play your part, and the part you play comes with consequences. And this we might call the age of control and responsibility.

It goes on for a long time, but life doesn’t stop there. Eventually you reach the post-grown up stage when people stop expecting much of you, when responsibility and control diminish, when you’re forced to accept support again just as you did as a child. And then you feel yourself to be sidelined, sitting idle in a dinghy being towed behind the big boat with the grown ups in it. You don’t like it much because for the past forty or fifty years you’ve grown used to being a player in the big boat, whether as captain, first mate or crew doesn’t matter. At least you were there, and now you’re not. The muscles no longer have quite the power they did, the lungs no longer have quite the capacity they had, the sinews lack the elasticity you’ve come to expect of them, and even the mind works more slowly and with less acuity. And so you become ever less of a player and ever more of an observer.

I sometimes wonder why I’m not writing fiction any more, but instead looking around for things to rant about. I suppose it’s because there’s nothing much else to do when you have your kitbag packed and you’re preparing to take your seat in the dinghy. I can’t say I’m entirely comfortable with the approach of a novel situation. Choosing to walk apart as a recluse suits me, but being pushed aside by the tyrant time doesn’t.