The flailing, rudderless intensity of youth is becoming an ever increasingly faded memory for those of my generation. We now appear to be adults, the ones this world is set up for. We do the work, we earn the money, we have the freedom, we make the rules and we get to choose when to break them. We have everything that we lacked in the wild, chaotic, hollow throes of youth. We have sway, we have possession of our lives (whatever that may mean), we no longer have to explain why we are doing what we are doing. Everyone is quite happy to just let us roll on by, content that we appear to be a relatively ordinary member of whichever society happens to be occurring around us at this moment.
For some of us this came easy. As easy as taking off one pair of shoes and putting on another (already well broken in) pair. For others, this was a transition perceived from a young age and feared with all of the intensity of a fast moving HGV bearing down on a man with two broken legs. Some felt unprepared. Some felt that they would not, could not, ever be prepared for what was to come. Some lay awake at night fantasising about becoming their movie heroes within their own lives and somehow transcending the inevitable loss of freedom from responsibility. Some remained entrenched in fantasy well in to their twenties, refusing, or possibly unable to stand up straight in the clothes that life had dressed them in.
The greatest fallacy within the youthful perception of what adulthood will be like is that you will actually feel like an adult and no longer feel like the person that you felt to be when young(er). If the mental, conscious “self” is dependent on the contiguous memory link of past to present, perhaps the issue of perceiving our own mental age is the same as that of perceiving our aesthetic age. We are confronted with our own reflected image constantly in this world (at least we are if we take the time to stand briefly at the sink and wash our hands in forward thinking respect of anyone we may happen to shake the hand of later that day). We rarely have pause to stop and think “Sweet zombie Jesus! I am looking oooooold!”. That is, until we happen upon a picture of ourselves from the past. The forced memory of photography is an absolute swine for anyone who wants to escape the past. I happen to love it. It reminds me that we do change. No matter how much I still feel like that little boy who, at the tender age of ten was so terrified of what lay ahead at the end of those oh so finite teenage years, swore off marriage, fatherhood and with them, all of the opportunities and freedoms that an adult life may offer.
And so, twenty two years later, I still have that memory of my own fear of what I would have to face when stripped of the precious protection of childhood. Little did I know that what I should have feared was not adulthood but the utterly unfathomable depths of emptiness and pure, naked, raw emotion that are “ADOLESCENCE!”
To be continued...
...perhaps.
Money is one of the most serious factors of life... Keep on making money
Posted by: Phillipp96 | 20 May 2010 at 22:55
That certainly goes without question Phillipp :-)x
Posted by: Dr David Coddingsteine | 20 May 2010 at 23:08
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Peace David!
“ADOLESCENCE" is very nice!
Peace and love!
Posted by: Omari Omarya | 30 July 2010 at 22:13
Omari, I have yet to find a way beyond it :-)x
Posted by: Dr David Coddingsteine | 30 July 2010 at 23:01