The Inevitable Age
The Daily Post dared to put the word Age as the word of the day. Age – as if it isn’t on everyone’s mind anyway.
The young try so hard to be older; the older try so hard to be ‘the perfect age’ for the group (that means young or beautiful or both, even if no one really knows what these terms define); the older-than-middle-aged try so hard to forget all about it!
As if age is what really matters!
I have a rule – unbreakable, this one – a person’s mind is capable of amazing things, and if I listen, if I ask the right questions, if I open my mind – I can learn from them. There is no age barrier, no height barrier, nothing stops that mind having something I can use, learn from, help with, etc. (I’ve been told off for using the etc., but it’s still there!).
As a carer for a multitude of foster kids (dare I even count them?), and some (most) weren’t all that much younger than I was (their guardian! Right!). Every single one of those kids taught me something, every single thing we suffered through together taught us something, every single action we took demonstrated something to someone else.
All the teenaged fosters needed a bit of prodding to open their minds, to see what they had inside that was worthy. They had ‘issues’ from the past. A bit like digging at a bit of scab, really, to see if there was good repair work under that. Once the scab (and sometimes the scar) were seen to, life could go on. Sometimes it was painful (okay, always), but once underway, the process of expanding the mind was graceful, delightful, beneficial, exponential.
It didn’t matter what age the kid was, it didn’t matter where they came from or what experiences they’d suffered through – as long as they had an active and searching mind, all could be well.
‘Open the door, and see a path to somewhere.’ These words were our ‘secret’ code to recognition of each other.
And I could use the things that came from that part of my life. And I do. The stories we told together (some from my own childhood, some used from their experiences) became a solid foundation. That foundation gave us all (yes, me too) something to hold onto, to refer back to, to underpin us as we took those steps into the new journey.
Age? Pffffft. Means nothing.
I am not young anymore, but my body is far older than my mind. In my mind, I am the same person I was when in the full ruckus of a dozen or more fosters playing a game of hidden words, hidden worlds.
Long shall we dream beyond the physical, social, structural limits of the outer – and the concept of age.
Did I ever tell you that most of these blog posts are unplanned? They are. I didn’t mean to write this, but I see all around me the things people want to do to make ‘age’ into something it isn’t. I’m over a certain age, it means I can’t get a job – too old now, regardless of my training, experience, etc. I even tested the theory and put in applications that had a ‘few’ years missing, and guess what – interviews! But no jobs, because you have to show up in person at some stage. So I had a rant on what age doesn’t mean. And that’s it – now I just get back to normal life [for a writer, that is], back to the story of Anna, Sylph, in her journey through ‘the Valki of Three Salt Springs’ now written to the end of Act 1 (and thanks to the people who proffered up assistance).
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