Age (1)

Today I am twelve months older than I was at this same date, one year ago.  In turn, I am twenty-four months older than at this point two years ago.  These signifiers add cumulatively to four-hundred and thirty-two months, a number that must have started at zero and increased from there.

Today is February 10^th 2013.  It is my birthday.  I am thirty-six years of age.

What does this mean?  Well, wisdom is supposed to come with age.  The experience of living, of laying memory paths down in one’s brain, should provide us with the tools to cope with that same life.  This is what we hope.

Am I wiser?  Certainly, I can see where I went ‘wrong’, where – if my life was an 80s movie – I would revisit and set differently.  I am also known to take out tiny pearls of wisdom from my pocket and place them onto the upturned palms of others, some of whom make bracelets of them, more who drop them to my floor as they say goodbye. 

But if there is wisdom, it is without grace.  It is not the white-haired, gentle acceptance of life.  If anything, my experience makes me angrier.  I know that the world is unfair – that the vast majority of everything is in the hands of a few who mean to keep it and that there is little anyone can do about that.  We were born to fail.  And with each passing day I rally against that more and more.  I beat my fists against it and screech into its mean, horrid face.  Being wise does not mean being happy, then.  Perhaps He was right when He advised me not to bite that apple.  Ignorance is bliss; Nirvana merely the state of nothingness.

Wisdom is the product of what we know, or at least what we think we know.  It isn’t precognition – the knowledge of things to come.   My reaction to the unknown, to the scary monsters that await me on my journey onwards, is still to be seen.  I cannot be wise to this.  You will tell me that my wisdom will give me strength, a speed of reaction tuned by the ups and downs experienced so far.  And yet the fact remains that this land lying over the horizon is unseen.  There will be things I am unwise to. 

So, it seems that age is not the guarantee we hope it to be.  We have this view that, in return for all the wrinkles and the cracking bones, the next day will be easier.  Shocks and upset are for the young, old age a static line of same-ness with the odd Saga holiday thrown in for good measure.  Poppycock!  If in old age little happens to me, it will be because I shut the door on it and not let it enter again, spending my eighties dying miserably in front of daytime TV.  

Life is what it is.  It will continue to delight and appal in equal measure.  All my living so far prepares me for is that this will happen.  My wisdom is the acceptance that life is not a reward card system whereby, if I bank my points earned – a good job, being nice to my neighbours – I will be awarded with some kind of coupon reprieve from all that nastiness.  

And yes, this also seems unfair.  Surely the struggle should lessen as we get older?  But imagine – this means that we never grow ‘old’.  Each and every day is different whether we be thirty-six or eighty-six.  There is a crazy, terrifying beauty in that and on this day - my birthday - I feel wise to it.