The road of ageing

An earlier posting noted that people who lose in ‘reality’ talent competitions on television usually describe their experience as a ‘journey’. This is one of many clichés. Some people claim to be ‘born again’, others to have reached a ‘turning point in their life’. At times we have a sense of opportunities not taken and difficult tasks preferred, as in Robert Frost’s wonderful poem:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveller, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Most of the time, however, we do not experience choice of this kind: we just see signs on the road that tell us that for some time our lives have been heading in an unexpected direction. This is true of the experience of ageing. My first such sign was in 2001 on the Great Barrier Reef near Port Douglas in Far North Queensland. The family had split up for the day - my wife went on trip in a glass-bottom cruiser and I took my two children (then aged 15 and 12) on an escorted snorkelling expedition. I made the usual assumption of fathers that my job was to protect my children while encouraging them to explore. But they swept ahead after the group leader, plunging down to follow a large turtle along the Reef. I was unable to keep up, floundered, and surfaced. I saw the boat a few yards away, and wondered if I would reach it. My children, I realised, needed to look after me.

Now I have passed another sign of ageing - retirement. On Friday, I went to a party at the University organised and paid for by my most generous colleague Dr Qulsom Fazil. I am also grateful to all the people who came and wished me well, and for generous gift. Anyway, this is voluntary early retirement. I intend to carry on teaching intellectual disability, preparing distance learning texts, and writing about social policy. But I will have more time to also write to prisoners of conscience, to improve my language skills, and to walk through the hills and fields of Worcestershire.

http://stuartcumella.blogspot.com/2009/04/cliche-rears-its-ugly-head.html