I am on the A565 Trunk Road(quaint name), heading into Southport. It’s a beautiful afternoon, warm, sunny. There’s the usual weird wobbly rumble coming from Old Grumpy. I think it’s the CV joints, though the last mechanic I discussed this with reassured me it’s more likely the tyres.
I’m doing about 45 mph, trailing at a respectful distance behind a Nissan Micra. The speed limit here is 60, but there’s no hurry. We’re overtaken with an impatient flourish, and in swift succession by a BMW and an Audi, then another BMW, each brightly lit. This is such a cliché.
Numbers one and two son complain, and enquire of me if I am comfortable being so humiliated.
“Humiliated?” I enquire.
“You’re just too patient,” they say.
Ah! At this point I am supposed to “burn” the Micra off, and regain face by doing battle with the arrogant, hectoring haste of the BMWs and the Audi.
Grumpy is capable of a respectable 120 bhp, and I am capable of the occasional burst of speed, so all things are possible,…
However.
“The funny thing about patience,” I say, “is that I’ve spent my whole life waiting patiently for something to happen, only to realise that it does not exist.”
“Profound,” says number one son, facetiously.
“Sad,” says number two son, ironically.
But it was not “sad”. Nor had I wasted half my life waiting for that certain something that it turns out did not exist. The realisation itself is a valuable thing, profound if you like. Softening of ego the prize of middle age; anything else, by the time you reach your fifties is, in some regards, a failure.
When does my life begin? When I finish school? When I finish University? When I get a job? When I find someone to marry? When my kids are born? When my kids have left home? But already I am forty five, I am fifty, I am fifty five, and I am still waiting for my life to begin. Patience. Patience. How about when I retire?
Will my life begin then?
Of course your life began when you were born. And you knew how to live it then, one day at a time, one moment at a time, until you were slotted into society, probably around the age of five, and your first day at school. And then for the rest of your life, you were living it with your eyes either focused on some point in the future, like hometime, or looking back with regret or longing. Maybe tomorrow I will begin my life, or, if only things had been different, I might be living it now.
What would it be like, I wonder, to live one’s whole life as a child, a child unsullied by the corruption of a “civilised” education, a child untainted by the virus of “ambition”, the egoic craving for attainment, of rising to the perpetual aspirational arrogance of the brightly lit BMW and the Audi?
Focussing our attention, our hopes, our aspirations, even our fears in the future leads inevitably to the negation of the importance of our lives as they are right now. So no, I did not mind that the BMWs, nor the Audi had blasted past rumbly Old Grumpy, nor that the little NIssan Micra seemed in need of a bit more speed. I was preoccupied only by the beauty of the afternoon, that the chestnuts we passed were in blossom, that the yellow tassels of laburnum were unfurling, which placed us precisely a week away from number one son’s birthday.
BMWs and Audi, rear view hoggers and cliche’s, were gone into the far distance now. Transient. Unimportant. Is life a race to the bottom? No. More important is the realisation that what you’ve spent your whole life waiting for does not exist, that life, actually, is “now”.
The Rivendale Review 