TheBanyanTree: Twaddle!

[John Bailey]

Tuesday August 26, 2003

TWADDLE!

I seem to have slipped a cog and missed a day today. Again. Oh, we went and 
did stuff, and laughed our way through it, as we do, but my heart and head 
were somewhere else, and I'm not sure where. I've been doing rather a lot 
of that recently. I feel somehow as if I'm at a crossroads but I'm darned 
if I can see the road at my feet, far less where it leads.

In my foolishness I had supposed that, as one grows older, one leaves such 
conditions behind. Twaddle!

There's a deal of writing and talking about the mid-life crisis. Well, I 
had mine, a long time ago, and I have to say it was quite good fun, really. 
Upsetting and disturbing, too, but more fun than fear. I was lucky, I admit it.

Once through that one, though, and over the retirement hump, it seems 
you're on your own. If you hit a crossroad as you get older there's no 
convenient, thought-avoiding label to pin on it. All you can do is sit 
back, think about it, and work it out for yourself. Analysis, definition 
and solution, they're all up to you.

The conventional solution, though I'd name it an easement rather than a 
solution, is to throw yourself into voluntary work, and do good things for 
your neighbours. That's salutary. Laudable, even. Thing is, you see, poets 
don't do voluntary work. Poets are selfish, self-centred people who regard 
neighbours as noisy interruptions rather than deserving objects in need of 
a helping hand. Any good a poet may do is as a by-product only, secondary 
to his inner, utterly self-centred obsession with putting words together in 
such a way that the electricity shows through. And, so far as I'm 
concerned, that essential fact hasn't changed as I've grown older, not one 
little bit has it changed.

I used to advise anyone, mostly young someones, confronting a similar 
situation, to 'hold your nose and jump'. Not bad advice, and I still stand 
by it. Trouble with holding your nose and jumping in later life, though, is 
that you're liable to drop your walking stick and misplace your spectacles.

I imagine that, at this point, I'm supposed to pull myself together and say 
that it's all stuff and nonsense.  Except I'm not sure about that. The good 
old, reliable, "Hey ho, let's have a nice cup of tea" solution to life, the 
universe and everything, isn't helpful at the moment. Not at all.


--
John Bailey   Carmarthenshire, Wales
journal of a writing man
<http://www.oldgreypoet.com>