Maybe it’s all the health issues I’ve been having for the past while. Maybe it’s the fact that the high school reunion will be happening next month (and I’m not going, even though I still live in the same town I grew up in – because I don’t ‘do’ large indoor gatherings – because Covid), maybe it’s just that I’ve reached ‘that’ age.
Maybe it’s the fact that I wrote a ‘memoir’ last year and published it this year. Maybe I just never grew out of the ‘what’s it all about Alfi’ stage and I’ve always kind of, sort of, wondered why I’m here and what I’m ‘supposed’ to be doing.
I certainly have not chosen a life that society deemed was appropriate for me. And even now there is a huge slice of the population trying to tell me again that – because I’m childless, old, and broken – I’m useless.
What value do we put on life? Anyone’s life? Is ours the most valuable? Maybe. Mine is certainly of value to me. But is it of value to others?
Covid has caused a lot of people to ask themselves how much they care about themselves, and others. And some of them just don’t.
Climate change is another turning point – literally. On the news nearly every night there is a litany of ‘unnautral’ disasters – flooding, wildfires, hurricanes, tornadoes, landslides, sinkholes, diminishing glaciers, rising seas. And every single night, the big ‘news’ is how governments are going to mitigate the damage, and never, not once, does anyone say ‘wait, maybe, just maybe we should be working at fixing the problem instead of the symptoms’. Instead one politician is stumping around Canada (and why is he doing that, he’s not supposed to start campaigning until the writ drops) chanting Axe The Tax!
I’m far too old now to care much about what others think of me. Maybe because I chose a different path while in my 20s and abandoned society’s expectation that I would have 2.5 children, keep a spotless home, have a 9 to 5 job that was killing my creativity/soul.
I watched my father die slowly from a nasty cancer, far too young. And I asked myself, was I willing to put nose to grindstone and do what was expected of me or was I going to feed my soul and do what *I* wanted.
It didn’t hurt that I could joke about it. After all, you have to be warped to weave, right? So I embraced that.
I chose the road less travelled. What I didn’t expect to find were so many others who also found that road less travelled more interesting than what society had deemed imperative.
As I look back on my life, I have done more, accomplished more, met more people, been more places, than a blue collar kid growing up in the middle of the province had any reason to expect.
Regrets? Well, I have a few, but I suspect that had I NOT chosen the road I did, I would have been a very unhappy person. Instead I have helped, encouraged, and promoted others. I have tried, in every way I could think of, to teach others, point them in the direction of more information when I could not provide an answer myself. And every day, I get to create something new. Something that has never existed before. I focus on creating things, not destroying them.
And all in all, that seems like enough, even if I have to do it at a much slower pace than I used to be able to maintain.
Stay warped, my friends.