It was my fiftieth birthday a few days ago.
Reaching 20 was no big deal. I was still at University, with few things worse than exams to worry about, and the rest of my life ahead of me.
Getting to 30 did cause me some soul-searching; it's harder to still think of yourself as young once you've left your twenties behind. But, I had my health, I was married now, and owned my own house. Life seemed on track, and the future still beckoned.
Arriving at 40 I was surprisingly comfortable about. Different house by then, and different wife, but the imminent prospect of starting a family kept me feeling young inside, so I could cope with having reached 'middle age'.
50, though, is much tougher to laugh off. For a start, if I'm still middle-aged, that means I'll have to make it to 100.
There's more: up to now I've thought of Saga holidays as an activity exclusively for a person's sunset years; now I'm allowed to go on them.
Worst of all, I've been officially reclassified as an ('older citizen'), with my own Assembly, and even my own festival, where presumably I can meet other 'old' people!
Well, stuff all that! I've still got the rest of my life ahead of me (albeit thirty years less of it now), plus most of my health, and I'm not going to start feeling old just because it's expected of me.
Chewing my muesli that morning, I decided it was time to start some new interests. And then, in a flash, I finally thought of a snappy title for this blog I'd been toying with starting. So here I am, taking my tentative first steps as a Blogger. I only hope I'll be able to live up to the high standards that implies.
No comments:
Post a Comment