age | Inappropriate Footwear

pigs head

My age was a defining characteristic right from the start. Actually, probably before the start, measured really from the moment of conception. Once I was freed of the womb, it was a scale against which my progress was judged. “Oh, so he isn’t crawling yet? Never mind, maybe he can be a conservative.”

It soon became part of the way I defined myself. “My name is Regan, I can draw an airplane and tie my shoe laces and I am four-and-three-quarters”. It became a ranking system in social situations. The five-year-olds got the toy rifles, those under five made do with sticks or finger-pointing. Though I did learn to draw that Remington two-finger pretty damn quick.

It was age-division that was my first experience of segregation. Specifically the great adult-child divide. At celebrations us children got a lower table, fewer items of cutlery, and higher sugar-content foods. The adults had the taller tables, more complicated social rules, and decisions to make on who would have to drive. I also learnt that certain behaviour, activities and ideologies were restricted to each side. Alcohol, untruths and high-impact cursing were strictly for “the adults”. Imagination, playtime and brutal honesty were the domain of children.

And yet my memories of childhood are largely of sunlight and adventure. I didn’t undergo any of the maturity summoning transformations that some of my peers had to face. My parents never divorced, I didn’t have to raise my siblings, I was neither abused nor abandoned. I got to be a very thorough eight year old, building fortresses from cushions, mown-grass, and imagination. I was a competent ten-year old, earning my scars by playing games of “policemen versus protestors”, riding my BMX off cliffs, and hurling adult-branded curses at bullies. And I became well-versed in the dark arts of teenageism. Blushing around girls, arguing with Dad about the length of my hair, and replacing judicious portions of my parent’s darker spirits with tea.

When I look at a photo of myself on my 21st birthday, I realise that I largely matched society’s age-expectations. I had a peer-inherited (and media enhanced) disregard for authority. I had long hair, and a tattoo with an ungracious story. I left university classes early to play bass guitar in a metal band named Shocker. And I had a Rainman-like ability to calculate the best alcohol-by-volume-by-price in a bottle store. Yip, 94% age-appropriate.

Social pressure remained relentless, if not always overt. I understood that by the age of thirty I should have been married, with a house, and maybe a child on the way. I rebelled. It wasn’t until thirty-one I had a wife and a house. And horses. I had a good, steady job that paid well, but I’d demoted fantasy and imagination, replaced some of my dreams with wants. As a result there was a tension within me, a pull between society’s expectations, and my buried needs. At thirty-three, I imploded. House, home, relationship, job. I didn’t have the emotional maturity to deal with the aftermath. So I boarded a plane.

For the next few years I put myself in situations where I lived, worked and danced with people ten years younger than me. People who labelled their hopes as certainties rather than impracticalities. People who looked for their options on a wide horizon rather than down a narrow tunnel. Ok, some of them pissed in the laundry, shat in the shower or offered loud advice from places of ignorance. But by now I knew that age was no antidote to foolishness. I started to realise that elucidation had to be earned, not granted. So I paid attention to my surroundings.

One of the greatest things about immersing yourself in an unfamiliar community, is that you have a chance of developing empathy, appreciation, understanding. Ageing is an opportunity through which we can build comprehension through experience. What it is like to sit in your first maths lesson. What it means to be afraid of the dark. What it means to be struggling with teenage ideas around gender. Imagine what we might gain if had to live through a range of ethnicities? Or if over our lifetime we gradually shifted gender? What insights and understanding might we draw?

And yet such opportunities might well be squandered. At thirty I believed that the people I could best relate to, were those of my own age. I thought that we’d been born at the best possible time, and that we shared things no other age could understand. Hair metal, misogyny, The Goonies. Besides, society frowns at the idea of inter-age mingling. It represents it as insidious, or inappropriate, or sad. At thirty-three I began to undo my prejudice. As a consequence I spent the next ten years learning my most consequential lessons in humility, creativity, and the development of wisdom, from yoofs.

One of those world-shakers was my girlfriend for much of that time. She taught me the importance of honesty, and honour. Of forgiveness.The difference in our ages wasn’t a problem until a biological alarm shifted her world. Fortunately she’d also taught me enough about self-reflection to avoid immolation, and so I began hosting couch surfers in order to fill a number of voids. And I was surprised to find that one of the most spontaneous, creative and inspirational was a woman just a little older than me. She had endless stories, she’d made beer for years, and she lived in Boulder, Colorado. Like Mork and Mindy (kids my age will get it…). I booked another flight.

She introduced me to a range of wonderful people, people who at forty, or fifty, or sixty, who still had an eye on the horizon. People who didn’t let their age dictate who they should be. People who rather than giving up on their dreams, had chased them down, and then found new ones. And since then I keep finding older-aged heroes.

Ageism is a powerful prejudice, one which build barriers and promotes ignorance. Our societies should promote kinship, not division. And as with anything societal, it is up to me to be part of any change.

So I choose to see age as a choice, not a curse. I can choose to age poorly. Choose a diet designed to challenge my heart and bowels rather than befriend them. Choose to define functional alcoholism my pointing to the one gunt in the pub that’s more pished than I am. Choose to tell myself that a sore back, a beer belly, and a mutually damaging relationship with a girlfriend I’ve taught myself to hate, are all symptoms of too many years, rather than my own poor choices.

Or I can choose to learn every day, to rewrite my prejudices through experience. Choose to summon the vigour and hope of my teens and wrap this around the compassion and care I’ve taken on in my forties. Choose to measure people by the depth of their hugs, the warmth of their smile, and their capacity for enjoyment, rather than the country of their birth, the number of candles on their cake, or their possession (or lack of) a Y-chromosome.

I choose to make (as much as possible) my own choices.

flaming-june

I was raised in a lands-end suburb that bordered on a children’s paradise of ponds and gullies and hills. Men took to those hills from time-to-time, built basic shelters, shat in the earth, and burnt food in stone-bound hollows. So as we kids roamed the goat tracks and stream beds we’d occasionally come across those blackened rocks, and breathe in the acrid scents of ash and loneliness. The marks of habitation, the shades of rough men with dark purpose. Or no purpose.

In those days (and hopefully still) Dads taught kids to criss-cross kindling atop tightly balled paper, to touch a flame to three different points, to wake the orange cinders with gentle breaths. And something would draw us back to those sites of burning hidden below the bus routes and parks. We’d shed our schoolbags as we entered the clearing, and imitated our ancestors crouched poses about the dark circle. One of us tears up a leaflet advertising a furniture sale, another breaks twigs, twists their wet strands, drops them in a small pyramid over the grayscale pictures of outdoor furniture and sun-umbrellas. The last holds one of three stolen matches over their worn-edged matchbox, rocking gently, eyes on the growing pile of kindling. There is ritual in the architecture of a fire, an act which might once have determined survival in lands our bodies were not evolved to inhabit.

We urchins exchange glances, there’s a nervousness around those moments before ignition. The last piece of wood is lowered, and two of us wriggle back a little, allowing the fire-starter space. Three matches, the first skips over the worn strike-pad, not a spark. The box is flipped, the match rotated, anxious fingers scrabble under watchful eyes. Another flick, the sound is rough but still no flash or flare. We other two ache to take up the task, our empathy is false, we feel frustration. Then a quicker flick and the match head is engulfed in a glow, and we are drawn to the scent of sulphur, the dance of the tiny flame. Cupped hands, scooped forms, the burning wooden sliver is lowered towards the curled newsprint.

Fire beckons something inside of me, something buried deep. Like seeing a pair of eyes in the dark, or listening to the first seconds of Michael Jackson’s ‘Beat It’. As I age I am coached to modify my behaviours, to bury some of my ideas and feelings under layers named ‘civilised’, and ‘mindful’, and ‘Health and Safety’. I am taught, both directly and indirectly, that we are not like other animals, that we should hold ourselves above the wolves, the bison, the apes. Fire reminds me of the lie of this. It excites me, the thrill of fear beneath the joy of feeling the warmth against the cold, watching the shadows dart about the walls. In its glow I am reminded the idea of safety is dependent on fear. And I think I am far more capable if I learn to handle dangers rather than avoid them. What sense is there in being alive, if I never really feel it anymore?

The sun is lowering in the sky as we dip lower, prodding at the low flames, blowing, wafting. The paper burns away quickly, the wet twigs smoulder a little, but the last flame ascends as smoke, and the matchbox is drawn up. The strike-pad is torn away, the box becomes part of the combustible stack. Impatience overpowers empathy and the next player draws up the tools of ignition. The next match is struck.

I find fire is a great conversational companion. It allows the eyes a distraction without demanding their attention. And it is sensuous. The shift of light defines us loosely, our form sketched rather than photographed. And we are allowed to be defined by the imagination as much as by reality. A meeting under flame is three times as likely to lead to intimacy. Probably. Some of my most evocative memories of the past are centred on bon-fired beaches, or fire pois, or a candle-lit stairway leading to a low couch, a bottle of wine, a hope for intimacy.

Us three young boys (at this age society has separated us from the girls, the horse riders, the hair-plaiters, the more capable minds), we work again with blowing and coaxing and wishing. We sacrifice a homework assignment drawn hurriedly from a leather satchel. The blue-printed questionnaire holds a long flame and our mouths form ‘O’s’ of wonder, and we pause for a second in the stretched yellow flickering. Then the paper is dropped and we shift twigs. And two of them catch, and white smoke begins to curl, lit up by the few spears of sunshine that penetrate the bush canopy.

Sometimes it is a radiant fire on a cooling beach, the lightest of winds drawing the smoke away from you (for now). Someone picks at a guitar, or speaks words, ‘Once, a long time ago…’, and our minds are released to travel on a voyage, to draw the characters, the situations, the Gods and beasts and heroes. And beyond the reach of the flames there is room for the imagination to plant stories, and monsters, and mythology.

Other times there is just you alone, over a flame in an old pan, holding a photo, or an agreement, or a letter of rejection. You can delete an email, or the last contact from a lover, or the image of an unholy prophet. But how much more cathartic is it to hold a thick sheaf of paper above a flame, lowering just a little further, feeling the heat of the smoke curling over your knuckles. Then the thrill as the flame runs along the edge, leaving a blackening shadow.

The embers pulse gently, the three of us talk of a great journey for the next day, on bikes into the hills. Maybe the horsey girls will be there. One of us begins to stand, tucking the last match and slice of box into a pocket. Another of us sprinkles soil over the embers, hands hovering over the gentle warmth. Then the three of us shoulder bags and move up the hill. None of us can resist a last backward glance at the pit. A brief silence gives way again to plans and schemes and nudges and laughter.

A fire is infinite form. It is a destroyer and yet it is born before us, from spark and breath. Flames to hold back the beasts, extinguish the shadows, summon the Gods. It is to be respected, and anything which allows reminds us to be humble is to be treasured. Humanity isn’t at its best when it ranks itself above all else.