The seven ages of man
The age of infant
The child was born when the child was young, but the world was old. It
had existed for billions of years without that child – or that tribe – or that
species – or life itself.
The child was born into
the teeming billions of the world, a blank slate to be written as anyone, with
just the basic Bios to get it started into existence before being influenced by
everything and everyone surrounding it.
Would it live to grow
into adulthood, outlive childish diseases?
Would it be a
subsistance farmer, just managing to scratch a living from the poor soil of the
available fields?
Would it be a wealthy
industrial leader with material riches to command, enjoy and waste?
Why the difference?
*
The age of boyhood
The boy is waiting for his birthday, looking forward into the unknown
future of his age of man, not knowing in which land it lies with its infinite
branching possibilities.
He does not know that his future is fixed,
just waiting for him to follow that one critical path.
He does not know that the
arrow of time does not move. It is a pointer to show when he is and time flows
around him to coalesce behind to form his passed times and add pages to the
history book of his life.
He is unsure about
everything. He knows nothing, but he knows that he knows everything.
How can it be otherwise
in a teenaging boy?
*
The age of
education
The boy leaves home. He leaves his family’s supervision and safety as he
joins a University and indulges in manly things. He gets drunk, stoned, catches
unknowable diseases but goes home as a child for free food, washing and sleep.
He learns enough of the
course to get by. He learns enough of life to grow up, hidden from his parents.
He thinks he understands
life and rails through the drunken nights with his peers against the
unfairness. He grows up some more.
He learns to compete,
he learns that the world does not care if he is there or not.
Now he is grown, enough
to accept the inevitable unfairness of the world. He turns to the matters of a
man and accepts responsibility for himself.
*
The age of family
and work
The man leaves education, finds work, auctions his strength of body or
mind to the highest bidder. He learns his trade, labourer or lawyer, both the
same – different bushels of corn for different work. He gains experience,
struggles and competes, spends his money on the family that he has gathered
around him.
His children grow,
needing him each day, competition between work and family. One day they need
him not, leave home; but still need money, and so it goes, the circle of life.
Children distant, nest
too big, time for a bungalow? ‘No stairs.’
*
The age of maturity
His age is but a twentieth of a millennium, the mountain is four million
times older, a Variscan G G G G...Great Grandfather.
He clawed his way up the foothills of the
corporate mountain range until he reached the sunlit uplands of calm
acceptance, no more promotion, just the casual fending off of upstart
youngsters who would dislodge him from his upland summer pasture.
He waits for his
pension, happy not to strive but to graze efficiently with minimum effort until
he leaves the threshing floor at the five of each day to return to his
dependable family.
Now he can pass on his
knowledge and experience, but no one wants it. They all need to learn for
themselves, no short cuts.
*
The age of age
The man is old, but not old as the mountain knows old, the mountain that
he can see with his one good, though rheumy eye.
He is on his own, but
content. He looks to the many years behind
His back is bent in a
way that only a wind resisting tree knows and his skin is barked like that same
tree, events of the many years embossed on the lignin.
His walking stick is
cut from that very oak; unfair as he does not care to prop up the supplicating
sapling that bows before the lazy wind.
Is there enough wood
grown yet to form his coffin so that he can lie restfully, peacefully in the
scarlet satin lining?
*
The age of rebirth
Life leaves the man, his corporeal skeleton is boxed and fed back into the Earth to be
chemicalised into minerals, metamorphosed and subducted into the mantle.
The life of the man is
but a tiny, unseen ripple in the fabric of the universe.
After many billions of
years, the Earth is engulfed in the heat of
the super nova Sun. Man has long escaped to new systems. The materials
that were the man stay behind.
The following
inevitable, gravity – driven accretion will see him reborn as part of the star
dust that forms a new system.
The universe continues;
indifferent, wheeling, expanding.
It knows nothing of the
man, an atom is an atom, to be used to build new worlds, no matter whence it
came, from peasant, rich man, granite or
mud.
This piece has been published in WordBohemia.
www.WordBohemia .co.uk
This piece has been published in WordBohemia.
www.WordBohemia .co.uk
