A zero this year, not as in net zero, but six zero. It was odd receiving cards with that number on the front as though it was meant for someone else. Whatever sixty feels like, it feels very much like thirty. Not forty, or fifty but thirty. Perhaps it is because the past decade has been exceptionally productive, and the learning trajectory positively vertical, full of surprises. some of them shocking but always useful. Sort of anticipating climbing the stairs and you end up peaking Everest. As with climbing it's interesting to look back at what you've achieved, but even more so to continue on. So it is with a lot of my friends who find themselves at this age, 'retiring' to do something for themselves, hooked onto the structure of what they have been doing for the past thirty rather than what they have actually been doing. I was with a friend who has lived in Hertford and is retiring from thirty years in teaching this summer, seeking out huge dramatic murals, which leads visitors and locals down paths they wouldn't have normally ventured. The friend is one of those who enjoyed both the work and the structure and is planning afresh, a change to another structure, less structured, but still structure. For me, it's been less about structure and more about journey. Not as in Strictly Come Dancing journey which is a format, which is another word for structure.
I feel very much life has been led along paths with the odd bit of drama, romance, adventure, fear, weirdness, and hope, and thinking of each trip as Freudian, Jungian or Tuckian (looked that one up in case it meant anything rude and it doesn't). There's the famous Mappa Mundi displayed in Hertford Cathedral, the 700 year old map which 'scholars' have yet to fully digest and understand. And I've been researching Edward de Bono's biography, about a man who championed thinking out of the box/lateral thinking, changing the patterns of not just how we do things, but how we think, our perceptions, which comes with age anyway. Read a book at ten, the same book at twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, you should read it differently. If you don't you haven't evolved. You are as stuck as the printed word. So it was when I read Alice in Wonderland at ten and then again forty years later. Same with films. So many films I thought romantic at ten now I look at and go 'ouch' such was the entrenched misogyny and the male narrative norm. (think Man with Golden Gun, Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein (although Madeline Kahn 'I'm tired' is priceless and how I felt for much of my forties).
As a freelancer for most of my life, the element of structure has always alluded me, or rather I have alluded it, recognising that although there are numerous positives (planning is much easier, although not guaranteed, bill paying is easier, although not guaranteed...) I have chosen to be, what one of my editors in the first week of meeting me recognised, free spirited. This has given me the opportunity, or rather I have given me the opportunity to do many things I have dreamed of, some I haven't, and others I would rather have avoided (but not many). So I find myself in a situation where I don't want to do different things or more of what I do already but really free spirit it. Add a zero to all my efforts for the next twenty years. An 80 is almost a 60 if you think about it. Just completing the circle.
