Age is not even a number for me. It is something that I count and re-count to ensure accuracy, while filling up the ‘age’ column in a form…and then forget till the next form! In between forms, I neither feel younger nor older with every passing event or day of my life! I could never associate age with ‘correctness of responses’ or ‘expected behaviors’. How can there be a blanket expectations from such a finite thing as a life span?
I haven’t felt age, for I have never acknowledged the supposed flip-flops of each time-span of life. The first and the only time I was conscious of aging was when I turned eight and my neighbors said I was now a big girl and was expected to behave so! As an adolescent I concurred with all the beliefs and behavior-patterns my parents suggested and hence there never was a generation gap. It must be that my thoughts simply concurred with the elders!
Or maybe I was a generation behind then and that would make me twice as old today than my actual age. But then this isn’t true too. Because at the other end, I am admonished as “teenager’ by my people at home for certain of my indulgences and enthusiasm over apparently mundane and ‘juvenile’ things! Must age limit not just expressions but also likes and dislikes? I love candy floss and cheeni parantha; dislike outings and am ambivalent about movies. I was so since adolescence. Why should I expect all that to change with growing years?
So then, how old am I really? And what does age and ageing mean?
I count age by experiences and events, numeric definitions be damned. There were or are as many bright teenagers as were idiotic ‘adults’. Growing old in numbers is very basic. I count myself as student-experience old or wife-experience old or doctor-experience old. How does it matter at what numeric age I go through these phases… that I went through them matters and that I added some understanding of life through that experience is what counts as ageing to me. Most phases like motherhood, professional life, relationships are not finite and I merely ‘age’ through them adding on more understanding. There could never be a numeric age for some other abstracts like love, passion, greed, sadness, hurt and such too…They are undying too persisting, evolving or abating through a life time…I could never get ‘old’ at these.
Just as travelling in Space fetches us to a distant place than the initial one, so also travelling through Time gets us to older stages than from where we began. It is an acknowledgement of the inevitability of Time passage and also an appreciation that the eventful journey between the time points is what life is all about…The in between stops can never dictate to me how and how not the responses to Life must be! I could be sagely conservative like my parents about dress codes or marriages and then, be outrageously liberal about religion and human relationships…both at the same ‘age’ and probably both unacceptable as not befitting my age!
As a seven year old, I often stood before the mirror for long minutes, asking of the stranger there -“Who am I?” That ‘I’ is what I have always been, irrespective of the physical and social changes along my time span. That I still stares at me and asks of me the same question-‘Who am I?”Only now I don’t need a mirror and now there are many more such haunting interrogative pronouns to the I question. ”Why am I?” “What am I?” “When (how long) am I?”
I may never find answers to any of them in this Life time-for what are a few decades along a Time span of billions of Earth years? Yet along this finite journey I have discovered ways to travel with less and less baggage. It is easy on the psyche and emotions-two truant mis-guiders along the unknown paths.
At this year-station, I am beginning a new lesson/ “Living with emotions.” I will not disown any of my emotions or feel sorry or even responsible. If nothing lasts forever, emotions can’t be exceptions. Or could be! Some may fizzle out, some get stronger and some may follow me to my grave. But they won’t make me. Harmonious symbiosis is the nearest they can come without each of us ruining the other! That is the gift I gave myself this birthday!
No comments:
Post a Comment