I find twenty-six to be a strange number and a strange age. At 26, quite a few people I know already have marriages and children. Some people are just getting out of their 10 year-long psychedelic coke trip, deciding to clean up and start playing it straight.
And I just have a desk job.
Toiling away throughout my university program, I could justify having a desk job simply as a method of sustaining my life while trying to pay the tuition fees. But now that I'm out of school, and I'm twenty-six, and I wake up every morning to take the same bus to work, walk the same path to the office, greet the boss the same (awkward) way, turn my computer on, check the mail, check the voice-mail, update the phone message, turn the page on your daily-Dilbert calendar, (I wish!,) following the same routine pattern day in and day out. It feels like I've been at it for an eternity, when in fact I've only been in this (very entry-level) job a few months.
And though I'm quite new, and by far the youngest in my office building/historic gatekeeper's lodge, sometimes I can't escape the feeling that I might be reaching the big O-word.
And not the good one.
I'm talking about feeling OLD. My previous government jobs have made me feel like my body is being punished into a life of idleness and as a result degenerating at a much quicker rate than it would be if I were working anywhere else but behind a desk.
I felt that way in my previous job also, mainly on account of the fact that I dealt with cases belonging to people who were of a certain age and experience and who had certain medical conditions usually attributed to old age. When matters of these concerns are brought to your attention on a daily basis, I suppose eventually they numb you to the fact of thinking... "Well, this will be me someday." It may be years and years away, but when I was at that office, I felt it lurking around the corner.
The other day, I noticed a group of high school kids exploring the site where I now work. Two of the people in charge of this group looked like they were straight out of high school themselves. The young leading the young. When I pointed it out, my colleague exclaimed, not very tactfully I might add, that this means I'm getting old, and then related her own story of realizing she'd achieved middle age the moment she discovered she wanted to pinch a young police officer's cheeks after he'd pulled her over.
I think what I'm getting at is that it's important to acknowledge and appreciate the events in one's life that helps them understand exactly where they are in their lives and precisely where they should be in the scale of aging and of being.
I am not a person who is content with physical, social or creative inaction. I find it to be unbearably constraining, though it seems to have been the slippery slope I've been sliding every since my first job in the public service some five years ago.
I'm very hopeful that the new path I have chosen for the Fall brings with it different physical, social, psychological and intellectual challenges that I will almost certainly never meet, sitting in a cubicle, staring out the window into a world of things happening to which I am contributing nothing. It'll be behind a computer screen no doubt, but hopefully not in a cubicle.
I don't think there's anything bad about aging. I think, when done naturally and properly, it can be graceful and quite wonderful and I look forward to the benefits each new age will bring me. But I certainly don't want to bring any of the more difficult and stressful aspects into being any earlier than they're naturally scheduled to appear.
Now then, it's almost 7:oo p.m. Time for a bath and then off to bed!
