young | 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.

When I was young I thought life would be complete if I had a beard like Grizzly Adams, a car like the one in Smoky and the Bandit, and a girlfriend like Michele or Dale in my class. I always knew the girls at school were always better than the ones in the films, they were real. But I still held on to my signed photo of Wilma Deering from Buck Rogers. Just in case.

When I was young I made a pop-up Valentine’s Day card for the most beautiful, funny and athletic girl in my class, but she never received it. I remember looking at the pink ink running down my hand as I stood in the rain, three doors down from her house, trying to summon the courage to ring her doorbell. I’ve still got the card, I think it’s important to remember how big those small moments can feel. And my Mum found it hidden in my wardrobe and stuck it to the photo-board at my 21st birthday party.

When I was a boy I understood that people died. I remembered the sight of my Grandfather’s chair when he was no longer around to sit in it, and laugh loudly, and hand me giant tins of oysters. He died in his sleep, and I presumed that was the way I would go, not riding my BMX off the skateboard bowl, or running down the train tunnels as the train entered the far end, or being put in a ‘sleeper hold’ until I passed out. Years later people tell me that I’ve grown to be a little like him, and that makes me swallow, and blush, and feel proud.

When I read the comics I found at garage sales, I thought that Sea Monkeys and X-Ray Specs and Joy Buzzers would be and work exactly as advertised. Some adults feel the same way about international trade agreements, capitalism and world heavyweight boxing matches.

When I was young I thought that selling the life-size picture of Boba Fett I drew (with 18 felt-tip pens) to Kelvin for a can of coke and a go on his bike, was a sure-sign of my artistic future. Then I took art with Ms Manthell. She inadvertently taught me that the power of art was no longer in the hand of the artist, and never to trust an art teacher that didn’t like Kate Bush.

When I was nine my main rival for smartest kid in class was Kieran Bleach. It didn’t matter that she was a girl, it did matter that she beat me in spelling tests. She went to a girls school when we turned eleven, and I missed my nemesis. And learnt the word nemesis. A year later a ‘Fijian prince’ joined my class. It didn’t matter that his skin was a different colour, or that he had an accent (ok, maybe the accent was a bit fun), and eventually it didn’t matter that he was a prince. It did matter that he was funny, and fast, and had the biggest smile. It’s the truly important things that matter when you’re a kid.

When my Dad told me he went to school with the Six Million Dollar Man, and beat him in running races on school sports day (pre Bionics, obviously), I kind-of believed him. I also believed in George Lucas. My Dad never let me down.

I believed with great certainty in my own form of god, and in reincarnation. I can’t pinpoint the moment that being reborn in another form no longer made sense, but god lost his/her/its hold as I was drawing Wonder Woman in art class. I’m still not sure about Wonder Woman.

When I was young I sometimes wondered if the whole world existed to contribute to the story of just one boy or girl – that child was the star, everyone else was just ‘extras’. I wondered if I was the star, or just another player. Then I wondered if I had enough coins for a k-bar. Philosophy is transient when you’re eight years old, sugar is forever.

When I was maybe eight or nine years old I had my first dream in which I realised I was in a dream, and as such I had the power to do ANYTHING I WANTED, without getting in trouble. So I splashed in lots and lots of muddy puddles, then woke up clean.

When I was at school, and girls were almost as much a mystery as now, I loved and feared the furtive communications network of note-passing in class. As I aged, email or texts had a little of this power, but you don’t have a chain of giggling friends passing your email to you, threatening to read it. And email doesn’t smell like a freshly torn piece of maths-book paper.

I read about other lands, other countries, but at times they seemed so impossible, so far away. I thought that there was a good chance that New Zealand was the extent of the world, and that perhaps when people boarded a plane “they” simply gassed them all, and the people dreamt they went to far off lands. “They” didn’t figure very much in my childhood. In those days all burglars wore masks, all cowboys wore hats, and all policemen had moustaches. Then one day a girl who had always teased me, upset me, and called me square-head… she kissed me. All bets were off.

When I was young, I valued the idea of valour, I wanted a code of honour, I loved the idea of chivalry. I believed that most adults had my best interests at heart, and that the ones that didn’t were cautionary figures; at worst cartoon villains – scary, weird, but not capable of true evil. I had no idea how fortunate I was that this belief lasted my entire childhood.

One of the most important and telling things about my younger years was that I believed I could be or achieve anything. There was no such thing as probabilities, possibilities or impossibilities. Any objective could be realised with a mix of imagination and time. Imagination was more powerful than adults, film-reviewers and physics. A childish idea of Time was the key though, it could negate all barriers, if I didn’t achieve something today that didn’t make it impossible or unlikely, it just meant I might have to wait until tomorrow, or until I was ‘old enough’, or until a blue moon. When I was young a week was like a year, unless next week was Christmas, in which it was forever.

I’m at a different stage of young now, I think (hope?) that youth is a spectrum rather than an on/off state. I’m still in the lower end, just up from the BMX loving, shy-around-girls section, and hope I always will be.