Childhood Exploration and Relationships
Then as I aged I began to experience relationships first with my parents and siblings. Then with my friends, classmates and all the many strangers that appeared and disappeared as I navigated through life.
Youthful Experiences and Idols
Not only do you have to deal with this newness but you also have the body changing and evolving alongside all these transitions. You have the physicality and the emotional experiential development running together in unison like a train on a track headed to its final destination and we all know where that is, we just don’t know when it will arrive.
But…let’s not go there as this is about the journey, not the final destination…yet. 😉
In my youth, I was carefree and danced with the world of form. I wasn’t as mentally strained by negative experiences, they would just bounce off me and I would carry on living. I would explore learning and I loved singing all the new songs that would hit the charts week after week.
Music was such a joy for me back then. I was a kid of the 80s and loved all the colours and crazy dance moves with pop being at the forefront of my world. Madonna was so great in the 80’s and ‘A-ha’, no I am not saying ‘Aha!’ That was the name of a Norwegian boyband I followed. You may know the song ‘Take on Me,’ which hit the number two spot in 1985 here in the UK. It didn’t quite make Number 1 as it was pipped at the post by Jennifer Rush’s song, ‘The Power of Love’. My favourite member of the group was the lead singer Morten Harket, as he reminded me of Tom Cruise my all time favourite actor.
It is funny how your idols are an illusion in your mind. It’s best as they say not to meet your idol as often they will disappoint the magic of your imagination. How could someone truly live up to the perfection you set in one’s mind?
Although in 2008 I got to meet Tom Cruise on the set of Mission Impossible and he didn’t disappoint. He was as charming as ever, but really he’s an actor and I only got a few hours to spend with him alongside the myriad of other producers and actors on the set that day. I did get to chat with his sister Lee Ann Devette which was pretty cool and Katie Holmes dropped by too that evening. It was very surreal in many ways but an experience I will cherish as part of my journey here.
Anyway, enough name-dropping as this post isn’t about fame or status it’s about what life has taught me as I age.
As Joseph Campbell states in his book ‘The Hero’s Journey’, our search is for meaning. Life is one big adventure of the mental and physical transitions that unfold in every now moment. The world is constantly changing, it is not static even if we stood still for years our cells would carry on changing and evolving. It’s almost holographic even if we think we see a solid image in the next moment something within that solidity has changed, if only microscopic but it has changed.
Facing Mortality and Seeking Meaning
This takes me to the body and its ageing processes. As a youth I was carefree, living life, moving forward and choosing pathways in which to entertain my analytical mind. I wasn’t too focused on the body early on in my life, not that this is the case for everyone. Many young people today have a lot to live up to in certain cultures and I know beauty can be an ugly thing when perfectionism is marketed as something to achieve when the truth is, it’s an impossibility. They will convince you otherwise, as that is what sells and when we are young we can be very susceptible to psychological advertisements…but this discussion I will leave for another time.
Back to moving through my youth carefree even with the troubles of growth and family upsets. Life certainly wasn’t perfect and I had my fair share of suffering but I always managed to navigate through all of it fairly unscathed. I wasn’t fully aware of the things my unconscious mind was banking. It’s as if I was in a state of consumption up until I was 18 years old and then my father died and suddenly life hit me. That one experience sent shock waves through my body. It was the first time death had starred me squarely in the face. Dad was gone and nothing was going to bring him back.
Before all this, I was dancing with life and it was dramatic at times and fun and everything all rolled into one. My body was in shock at the realisation of an endpoint not just to my Father’s life but knowing this was coming to all of us. I would one day lose my relationships, I would one day not have options to explore and so my thirst for meaning in life deepened with age. I wanted to know why are we here. What is this all about exactly?
Now, I know concretely these questions cannot be answered. We each pass through that tunnel on our own and in varying different ways or so it seems. Some leave relatively peaceful and others go through what looks like hell. However, some near-death experiences report it being a very loving experience but the truth there is that they came back. No, one has been able to return from the ultimate grim reaper.
We always paint death as black because there seems to be no mind left in it. I have had a semi-close call with death when I suddenly became very sick with a stomach bug that almost wiped me out. I remember seeing just a bright white light and then it was as if I was on a roundabout and although I could not see anything to focus upon only a sheer blanket of white, I felt a motion and then a dissolving of my memory. I forgot for literally seconds who I was where I was and everything that had been built up in my mental body. It was all gone but then as soon as it was gone I was awakened and back in the world of form. My memories returned and I awoke stunned, weak and needing a trip to the hospital to check all my vitals were still okay. Thankfully they were and I am now here living and recalling this experience with you the reader.
Transitioning Through the Decades
I think I still have a long way to go at 50 years of age. I have lived through my teens, twenties, thirties, forties and now fifties. Yikes, I feel old all of a sudden and things aren’t working like they used to in my younger days. I am slowing down and taking in life more gracefully. Yes, I still have that young silly part of me inside and she pops up now and again to remind me to not take things so seriously. My twenties were about love and relationships, and how we need to navigate the emotional aspects of togetherness. It can be tough and it can be magnificent, just like a roller coaster up and down we go figuring out the emotional rushes and just going with them.
My thirties became more serious and my career was at the forefront of my mind. What was I going to do after university, where was I going to live and would I have children or not? I chose not to in the long run as that maternal feeling just didn’t hit me in the way many women have shared over my lifetime.
My thirties were a planning type of decade for me and even into my forties I was still doing the same but suddenly becoming more conscious of how old I was. I don’t think age would have mattered to me so much as it mattered to my culture and the narrative you are meant to fall into.
At certain points in life we are meant to have a career, a home, a child, a certain level of money and on and on it goes. It is quite exhausting trying to keep up with our cultural expectations and seeing it programmed into everyone else around you.
I have certainly not followed the norms of our culture and thankfully the internet has helped me find others who also have gone down the non-conventional path. Not that either one is right or wrong, it’s just I didn’t follow the masses as much as I saw the masses follow along.
Living in the Present and Embracing Change
Where am I today? I am still planning and searching for meaning in life. I love writing and creating art. Music hasn’t come forth in the way that I thought it would as a youth. I did beat myself up about this for many years, as I felt I wasn’t allowed to follow my dreams, they didn’t bring in the money. I listened to that dogma and went into a career that was thought of as ‘safe’, and that was ‘Administration’ of all things. It was versatile and yes it has served its purpose over the years but it’s not who I am.
However, no career truly defines us. As I said life is at the beginning life is transient, it is constantly changing and so the greatest moment of life is right NOW. Not yesterday, or tomorrow but here and now.
Enjoy your present moments as they flicker by like a butterfly. You will see many amazing things as you transition through this world. Each can be very unique if you see it through the eyes of youth and not with a grey haze of past age.
No, two moments are the same regardless of what your mind might make of them. The lighting will be different, a man or woman’s cells will be different, the temperature will be different and everything else your senses pick up on will be very different.
Life is a technicoloured dreamcoat as Andrew Lloyd Webber beautifully orchestrates. We are only here for a short time to burst in and be brilliant then burst out toward another star of light. That is where I feel we are headed as that blanket of white light seemed to show me during my near death experience.
We come in as star babies and go out into a vortex of light, ever to be forgotten and ever to be changed. Like the ocean waves continually moving and flowing within an omnipresent energetic field.
Go with its flow and be flexible, don’t grab onto things as they will always keep shifting and getting away from you. That is what ageing is doing, we can’t stay young forever, not physically anyway, you can stay young in the mind and celebrate the dance life is constantly having with you.
Join and have fun with the process, with the progression and with the changing pace of young and old. It is all a ride and you will gain many insights to share with those just a few steps behind. Pass on your wisdom, live as if you only had today and bring as much love to the world to make it a great place for all.
Thanks for reading and have a wonderful day.