I’m working on a new theory, that has no basis other than my own musings and some unsubstantiated references that I can’t fully remember.
The Seasons Of Life is something that has been bumping around my head ever since I first connected with Stevie Nick’s Landslide . Can I handle the seasons’ of my life? I’ve been carrying this lyric around with me for some time now it’s poetry captures something that we are all aware of, that we can’t quite put our finger on. We as humans have our own rhythms that follow a life cycle unique to us. Kind of like dog years. Our life cycles have less to do with earth years than we might imagine as our home planet circumferences the sun.
Our lives can feel split into very different stages and in fact we can feel like very different people to ones we we started off as. Yet very little in society is geared towards these changes, understanding them or accepting them. Instead we are programmed to be emotionally contained, financially viable, reproductive, ageless machines.
We are all expected to have family focused, connected lives without any guidance as to how, especially when we come from dysfunctional families ourselves. Yet respect is only garnered when we are raising families or indeed self-parenting ourselves in the perfect set up for our age. Whether it be a student flat in our early twenties, co-habiting partnership in our thirties, family homes in our forties and so it continues. Set one foot out of alignment with this carefully concocted materialistic display of how your life should be and you’ll feel the advert of human life short changing you. Unless you’ve been living on the family plot from the start? Then you just the centre of almost every movie ever made. You’re live is what has come to be expected of almost every film ever made, or lifestyle magazine. An established home of the upper middle classes that will allow you to flourish at poetry production and even get published (though it may not be any good).
So the seasons? Gestation, Infancy, Childhood, Puberty, Adulthood, Relationship, Parenthood, Elder, Death. None of them anything to do with money, all bringing their own emotional territory as we go along. Nought much to do with the planet either, Earth years just mark our supposed passages. When really they come in their own time. In their own season, not to be presupposed by our own human expectation.
After all “A swallow does not a summer make”
So there you have it the seasons of human life.
