The perception that we have options is incredible. It’s truly relative. So many people are under the expectation that they are obliged to be employed but the truth of the matter is that we are only employable so long as we are useful. Something which is becoming increasingly apparent in the current climate. Faced with the prospect of being made redundant do you find your hairs on your neck twitching? Standing to attention and saying “I cannot possibly lose my job right now.. it will destroy all of the good work that I have done getting here in the first place.” I only ask this because my hairs are not standing to attention but listening with quiet anticipation. Is it possible that in the safety of my job I currently wonder whether I might feel free given the option to abandon my duties? Given the option to fly away? Surely I cannot allow myself to have such irresponsible thoughts. Surely to allow myself to forget my duty to my career and ambitions would be not only wasteful but extremely fanciful and careless. That would be the case of course if my ambitions had anything to do with my job. They clearly don’t. I mean, I have ambition to be successful in the peculiar modernist corporate meaning of the word, but it’s just institutional. It’s not real. I can’t taste, touch or feel my benefit to the world by achieving this.
It’s hardly surprising then that so many of us end our 30’s with the view that we are but cogs in the financial machine or soldiers in the industrial system and this drives us to break out. Mid life crisis is not actually a crisis. It’s where we understand that we aren’t living the life we want but the life that we have somehow come to understand as the best possible route. It’s a period of realisation where we come to understand that from the second we are forced to take the same exam as all the other children that we are all somehow governed by the same understanding that we will never excel or exceed. Never be more than the system, conforming to it to ensure that we have a benchmark against which to measure ourselves. It’s ironic that the same system should be the one that taught me how to best express myself on this subject.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not lost. I’m still very much finding myself. I think the majority of us will still be finding ourselves for years. Perhaps that will be the case until we end up moving into real adulthood. This I define as the area in which we start the real nesting period. The bit with a large gardened house and fluffy animals are purchased at a rate of knots that was previously thought impossible by the human race. When cots and prams become your daily concern rather than yoga mats, gyms bags and emails.
So is it not the case that the idea of the nesting period is itself a best possible route? A design for life that is preconceived and that we should have it done by a certain time or date. This is obviously more the case for women than it is for men as Dr Bloggs has made sure we all understand the female of the species is to be impregnated no later than the 31st day of December the year of her 31st birthday. Peculiar that is should not be more aligned to the idea that a man and a woman have got themselves perfectly ready to have a child. But then… what’s ready?
I grant myself the free expression of this page to dictate to the world that the above paragraph is not only totally clear and accurate but to deny it is to suggest that I am of no right mind. That I am in fact in no way experienced enough a human to write this sort of information down and have it judged by any who I deem worthy to read it. Not that me deeming them worthy is some kind of accolade it isn’t. The funny thing is I guess I’m closer than I’ve ever been to feeling like I might get involved in the nesting bit… but at the same time wondering if it might be just another thing that interferes with me achieving my ambitions. Bit like my job really. Just in the way isn’t it.
So who truly has their ambitions fleshed out. A clear defining line between what they want and don’t. The clarity of mind to determine who and what is required to be with you to share, enjoy or contribute to the completion of these ambitions. Write down what you want from the next week, then year and then 20 years and after each of those write down the same list again. Would they be the same?
So how do we know how it will be defined then. The answer I think is that it defines itself mostly. You don’t control it so much as it controls you. You can travel away from it, you can square up to it, you can attack fiercely but the only predetermined outcome of it is it will happen. So what is it exactly? It is the exam that you never thought you needed to take.
There are only a few things in this life that I have already found out. But one of life’s truly inexplicable truth’s is that no matter how hard you try to alter it, it’ll get you in the end. It getting you doesn’t have to be a bad thing, you just have to be aware that it will.
It’s hardly surprising then that so many of us end our 30’s with the view that we are but cogs in the financial machine or soldiers in the industrial system and this drives us to break out. Mid life crisis is not actually a crisis. It’s where we understand that we aren’t living the life we want but the life that we have somehow come to understand as the best possible route. It’s a period of realisation where we come to understand that from the second we are forced to take the same exam as all the other children that we are all somehow governed by the same understanding that we will never excel or exceed. Never be more than the system, conforming to it to ensure that we have a benchmark against which to measure ourselves. It’s ironic that the same system should be the one that taught me how to best express myself on this subject.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not lost. I’m still very much finding myself. I think the majority of us will still be finding ourselves for years. Perhaps that will be the case until we end up moving into real adulthood. This I define as the area in which we start the real nesting period. The bit with a large gardened house and fluffy animals are purchased at a rate of knots that was previously thought impossible by the human race. When cots and prams become your daily concern rather than yoga mats, gyms bags and emails.
So is it not the case that the idea of the nesting period is itself a best possible route? A design for life that is preconceived and that we should have it done by a certain time or date. This is obviously more the case for women than it is for men as Dr Bloggs has made sure we all understand the female of the species is to be impregnated no later than the 31st day of December the year of her 31st birthday. Peculiar that is should not be more aligned to the idea that a man and a woman have got themselves perfectly ready to have a child. But then… what’s ready?
I grant myself the free expression of this page to dictate to the world that the above paragraph is not only totally clear and accurate but to deny it is to suggest that I am of no right mind. That I am in fact in no way experienced enough a human to write this sort of information down and have it judged by any who I deem worthy to read it. Not that me deeming them worthy is some kind of accolade it isn’t. The funny thing is I guess I’m closer than I’ve ever been to feeling like I might get involved in the nesting bit… but at the same time wondering if it might be just another thing that interferes with me achieving my ambitions. Bit like my job really. Just in the way isn’t it.
So who truly has their ambitions fleshed out. A clear defining line between what they want and don’t. The clarity of mind to determine who and what is required to be with you to share, enjoy or contribute to the completion of these ambitions. Write down what you want from the next week, then year and then 20 years and after each of those write down the same list again. Would they be the same?
So how do we know how it will be defined then. The answer I think is that it defines itself mostly. You don’t control it so much as it controls you. You can travel away from it, you can square up to it, you can attack fiercely but the only predetermined outcome of it is it will happen. So what is it exactly? It is the exam that you never thought you needed to take.
There are only a few things in this life that I have already found out. But one of life’s truly inexplicable truth’s is that no matter how hard you try to alter it, it’ll get you in the end. It getting you doesn’t have to be a bad thing, you just have to be aware that it will.
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