{"id":4006,"date":"2010-11-04T16:06:11","date_gmt":"2010-11-04T16:06:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/?p=4006"},"modified":"2010-11-04T16:16:31","modified_gmt":"2010-11-04T16:16:31","slug":"and-so-it-begins-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/?p=4006","title":{"rendered":"And so it begins again"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

It’s like those ‘seven ages of man’ gags, first documented by Shakespeare in ‘As You Like It’: infant, schoolboy, lover, soldier, justice, pantaloon, and second childhood.<\/p>\n

Except, as many of my friends would know, I have never fully left my first childhood. It clings to the hem of my coat, like a small child in a crowded supermarket, desperate not to get lost in the undercurrent of history that swirls around us.<\/p>\n

See?<\/p>\n

I still have it!<\/p>\n

I can still write shit.<\/p>\n

No, I don’t mean that my writing *is* shit, I mean that I can still write *shit*.<\/p>\n

So no confusion there then!<\/p>\n

Marvellous.<\/p>\n

But the point I was aiming at, and missed by a glorious country mile, is that once upon a time birthdays were important things.<\/p>\n

I used them to document the passing of time as I grew older; gradually crept towards one or other calendar-based milestones, that slowly edged their way down the line towards me.<\/p>\n

Sixteen: being ‘legally allowed to do it’, whatever ‘doing it’ meant, because I certainly didn’t know!<\/p>\n

Eighteen: being able to vote, because me putting an ‘X’ on a scrap of paper every few years has had such a profound effect on the outcomes of our flawed electoral system. Not.<\/p>\n

Twenty-one: getting ‘the key to the door’, another entirely useless anachronistic phrase that belongs in the Natural History museum, along with all the other dinosaurs.<\/p>\n

And then they stopped being events that mattered; all of the future benchmarks had been reached.<\/p>\n

When one creeps past ‘the big four oh’, the only thing left on the calendar is retirement – and that is now bucking the temporal trend by moving further away!<\/p>\n

So I put myself in a position where looking forward stopped being important, and looking backwards took on new meaning.<\/p>\n

Not, I add quickly, in a ‘backwards longing’ kind of way. I meant more of a ‘things that I’ve achieved that I can feel good about’, kind of way.<\/p>\n

Because it is *that* thought that takes me forward with a new set of things on my ‘to do’ list.<\/p>\n

‘What can I do better, smarter; where can I add most value’, these are my new goals for the coming year.<\/p>\n

These are the things that are more important to me now, not rushing around like a rabid lemon, trying to tick as many boxes as possible.<\/p>\n

I have my hit list for the next 12 months and, scarily, it’s a very long list.<\/p>\n

Sometimes gaining perspective is not helpful; it’s as if the more I learn, the amount I haven’t yet learned becomes highlighted.<\/p>\n

And that’s the really scary stuff about having a birthday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s like those ‘seven ages of man’ gags, first documented by Shakespeare in ‘As You Like It’: infant, schoolboy, lover, soldier, justice, pantaloon, and second<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4006","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stuff","two-columns"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4006","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4006"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4006\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4006"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4006"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4006"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}