It’s all around, so get used to it!

Comment upon the process of ageing is a familiar subject on the Rust – one might say it comes with the territory – and so I hope our readers will allow me this one.

It seems to me there are two basic competing themes. The first is that, on a day to day basis, human beings naturally regards ourselves as not just immortal, but permanently young and in touch, just like we were last week. And the one before that.

The second is that – beyond say the age of twenty-five – somehow external factors gradually begin building up, getting in the way, and eventually, inevitably, lead us towards a different perspective, i.e. that whether we like it or not we are in a continually progressing through different stages of life.

I refer here to ‘outside’ things such as contemporaries obtaining new jobs that take them to different parts of the country (or even abroad). Or getting engaged, or married, or having kids.

Or giving up sport, or just giving up living the hectic (singleton) social lives that they and you have been enjoying these past few years without an apparent care in the world – a situation you had thought would last forever.

Or grandparents and other ‘senior citizen’ relatives downsizing their homes, or no longer being able to look after themselves and coming to live with your parents in ‘granny flats’, or going into residential homes. Or people you know and love being seriously injured or even killed in accidents, or being diagnosed with cancer or other potentially-life changing (or threatening) diseases or conditions.

Another ‘ageing recognition marker’ that comes to us all is noticing the ages of other people.

This has two particular manifestations. The first is the experience of spotting notables or celebrities we know and/or admire listed in the ‘Birthdays Today’ sections of the national newspapers and being prompted to think to ourselves “Crickey, he (or she) is getting on a bit – I remember when …” [here please add your own special memory or memories from an era when said celebrity – and you – were in what might be described as a ‘heyday’].

The second, for those who have them, is that of registering that your kids have just passed through another ‘stage of life’ themselves. In this regard I’d refer the reader back to my earlier paragraph in which I described the ‘ageing’ effect of appreciating that one’s contemporaries have bought their first property, or got a new job, or are simply becoming serious about their life’s direction and ambitions (if any).

The reason for that ‘reference back’ is partly, of course, because – left to one’s own devices – one still permanently thinks of oneself at about the age of twenty-five (or perhaps twenty-seven) even when the morning shaving mirror is providing daily evidence to the contrary.

However, I do tend to agree with my own father’s dictum that nothing ages you as fast as the maturity of your own kids. He was cracking a joke a few years back when he offered this particular pearl of wisdom, something about his technique of chatting up ladies at cocktail parties being hampered these days by having to admit that his eldest son was over the age of sixty.

The truism – and you may have got there before me – is that, via a succession or either internal or external, conscious or unconscious, factors, we all eventually have to come to terms with the unavoidable fact that every life is finite. Even our own.

To begin with, the method for coping may be the adoption of a ‘devil may care’, live for the moment, seize the day, attitude. Some people start with a version of this – why else would people choose the military as a career, or take up dangerous sports or pastimes, if it wasn’t because of some ‘realisation’, not only that life is for the living, but that – because it could come to an end at any time, ‘pushing the adventure envelope’ is a perfectly acceptable way of proceeding?

After all, a very eventful but short life full of achievements may be as valuable (or even more so) than a very long life lived quietly without incident or extremes of experience.

Others may begin with a relatively low activity level and then – perhaps via an epiphany moment of some kind, even the onset of a disease – suddenly be moved to grow or adopt a similar ‘bucket list’ mentality.

And that’s really my thought for the day done.

I came to it gradually over the past week because of incidents in the lives of my kids, both of them now approaching their mid-thirties.

My daughter, who has been living with her partner for nearly six years, called me in a state of some excitement because the purchase of their new house is now scheduled for completion by the end of the month.

This is a milestone because – though I haven’t seen more than four pictures of the target house – in my mind’s eye it is what I would describe as a proper (four or five-bedroomed property, depending upon how you configure it) family home of the type that my parents used to live in when I was a child – and I lived in myself when my own kids were small. Big rooms, high ceilings and plenty of space.

My son lives and works abroad, running a business in the Mediterranean that he started with his own money less than a year ago in a very competitive industry. That’s something I never managed myself [i.e. starting my own business], for a start. He’s good at what he does, and a hard worker, but sometimes his attitude or approach to things is a bit ‘off the wall’ or naïve (I’m allowed to have that opinion because I’m his father) – which is why I occasionally chat with, or write to, him to impart what might be termed ‘business’ advice.

We spoke on the phone towards the back end of last week. He’s currently laid up somewhat with a leg injury caused by a motorbike accident – his work colleagues take turns to drive him to meetings – but in the past fortnight his company has bought a new van, two mopeds (for the workers to get about on swiftly and cheaply), two additional computers and a complete set of brand new accounting and ‘work scheduling’ software via which he can ‘call up’ every ounce of data the company possesses on his smartphone in an instant. [This against a background in which my recent nagging has mainly been directed toward the need to beef up his ‘business administration’ capability].

Two of my friends are what might be described as small businessmen running their own companies. It is interesting that, when I asked each what has been their biggest achievement, both (quite independently of each other) replied to the effect that it was “having survived in business this long”.

Who knows whether my son’s business will last another six months, or another six years … or indeed whether it will make him a wealthy man or instead send him to Carey Street?

All I do know is that, although my kids have contributed to me feeling my age somewhat this week, I don’t feel unhappy about this.