I chatted to a friend this week who reminded me of what he says to himself when life goes tits up and things don’t go to plan: “It’s not about the cards you’re dealt, it’s how you play that hand”. I thought about that long and hard and realised, as usual, he is right.
We naively believe we are on a predestined journey plotted out before us – a linear path going forwards in an orderly fashion. We go to school or college, gain qualifications to better our chances and it’s highly probable we start work and get our foot on a career ladder. We break our balls striving to buy property, believing the status of home ownership completes us as adults and spend hard earned income wining and dining prospective partners. Some of us marry. Some of us have children, or pets, or both. We work, play, sleep, repeat all the way through to a retirement, possibly become grandparents and then hope to hang on in there for many, merry years until we die. However, life isn’t like that. It doesn’t follow any rules. It doesn’t follow any order. The journey we think we should be following, doesn’t allow for accidents, mistakes or flexibility. It doesn’t allow for choices good or bad, turning left instead of right or falling in love with the wrong person (or indeed the right person but just at the wrong time). It doesn’t allow for illness or pandemics and it certainly doesn’t allow for the cruel twist of an untimely death.
We believe there is a set sequence and order to life, and put importance on this, but with hindsight I know that some of my best outcomes in life have been due to the mistakes I made in the past. Cocking up my ‘A’ levels meant I lost my place at my first choice University – I was 18, I thought I had ruined my life and my world collapsed around me. I took a year out, re-sat exams and ended up at a University I hadn’t initially considered, where I met my husband and 30 years we are still together, and miraculously - after two kids and a never-ending mortgage – are still getting on. Past errors, blunders and miscalculations shape us and determine the people we grow into. Likewise, past achievements and accomplishments may initially enable us to stretch ourselves, to reach for what we think we want - but can backfire where you end up trapped in a successful career or a loveless relationship that makes you miserable, surrounded by material possessions and a lifestyle you cannot escape. Explains many a person’s Mid Life Crisis.
There is no recipe for life. There is no right direction. I completely understand how the recent pandemic has created a generation of teenagers who are highly anxious about their life chances – really believing they will suffer because they cannot take public exams and that it will determine their futures and prospects for the rest of their lives. I listened to a young 15-year-old girl on the news, in tears because she felt her life was ruined and everything she had worked for ‘since she was 11’ had not been worth it. I felt sad that she felt that much pressure. What kind of society is it where this young woman is judging herself purely on her ability to sit a GCSE, who is so quick to dismiss any other achievement she may have gained throughout her educated short life? I felt heartbroken – I wanted to call out to her, to reassure her that, really, when she is a 50-year-old woman, the likelihood of her remembering what grade she got or whether merit was given on a teacher assessment or an external examiner, just won’t matter.
And maybe this unforeseen situation has some advantages and creates a generation of kids who don’t take their education for granted and learn the benefits of online learning, Google-Meets and computer skills they can take with them into the big wide world. I see my own son, resigned to life as it is – the boredom, the disappointment, the cancellations and try and explain to him that really, all of this may add to his life-experience. He doesn’t believe me but luckily is a pretty stoical soul, and just gets on with it.
No-one predicted this mess. No-one would have imagined a virus that was prevalent in bats would become a threat to humans. But as my friend says – that is the hand we have been dealt. We don’t know any other 2020 - that was the one we were given. And as horrible and lonely and cocked up it is – and 2021 so far hasn’t been any better either - that is the one we have to build into our own life’s experience and the only one we will ever know. Our grandparents lived through the second world war. My own parents were born just at the end of it. They didn’t know any other life and we don’t either. I am guilty of comparing my son’s experiences of being a 17-year-old, with my own - and fear he is missing out on the ‘normal’ socialisation of being a teenager. I worry how missing out on his proms, trips, exams and driving lessons will impact on his future self. But he doesn’t know any different – and in fact his own social life - which consists purely of sitting upstairs talking, laughing and larking about virtually with his friends on a Saturday through the beauty of technology, means he is able to continue healthy relationships with his friends - albeit in a way that is just so alien to us as parents. Imagine if we had had lockdown in 1983. Would we have survived purely on a diet of Dallas repeats and phoning our friends on a shared house telephone - after 6pm as that was the cheaper tariff -attached by a physical curly wire to the hall wall? I doubt it. I doubt we would have been so resilient.
The truth is, we don’t know what curveball will be thrown at us. We don’t know when life decides to challenge. We may look back with hindsight to our past and try and work out what we could have done differently or try and improve ourselves to ensure a smoother future; but to be fair, it is only the present we can work with - the cards we have been dealt this hand.
© The Real Tilly Fairfax
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