The Spring of Discontent

Despite delightful times, several excellent friends are having difficulties, and though each issue can't be lumped into generic categories, they do have an age in common; it's around the early 40s.

Maybe it's a point of having enough data and discrimination to try and analyse certain long term decisions. Options discarded get looked at again when the current choice has proven exhausting or unsatisfactory in some way, and it's even harder when we know it's not the choice that's 'wrong'; it fulfilled a need at the time but the need has changed.

My suspicion is that part of the problem comes from the way society holds stasis as sacrosanct. The idea is that you run towards having as much as possible as quickly as possible, grab it all and just stay there for as long as possible. But, given health, long life, opportunity, we must move, we must do things. Apart from having babies and making money, society prefers us not to do anything at all. We are handed down inevitable mantras:

Settle for a job
Settle for a house
Mate
Breed
Die

And we are conditioned, kept so busy, so diverted, so tired, we never question this itinery until we're irrevocably committed to it.

From the little experience I have, it seems that the forties can be the start of proper rebellion because it can be our fullest moment of agency and access to experience and information. But it leads to mistakes as well, the temptation to follow the once-upon-a-teen rush. Sometimes it really is the need to return, to find something vital that was lost. Of course, some dreams were nothing more; our reasons for discarding that option were actually valid. One can change, one can go forward. But going back? No road so hard as the nearly travelled.

It's a beautiful spring, the woods north of London are flooded with bluebells, and the motorway banks are strewn with cowslips and forget-me-nots. This spring's green is truly lush. That's the reality of life, if it's allowed to grow.

Here's to our growing lives.

Edited to add; So much for adult wisdom. Now here's what I want, in my thoughtless small girl reality; I want us all having great times, drinking excellent beers and dancing around in a nightclub or lying on a green bank on a summer's day at a festival, and just, you know, being ridiculous and happy. Like the kids we really are.