Experience

This blog post has been a long time in coming. I tried starting it – I tried starting another – but it’s one of those that you just have to write as you think it, watch the words form upon the screen and catch your darting fingers spidering in the periphery, sit stupefied as syllables pour out of fingertips seemingly without any interference from your brain. It’s very much like playing the piano from memory – after watching your hands sprawl energetically across the keys like blind wrist parasites making use of your eyes for their harmonic ends, you feel like your brain should probably try and get involved in the process, maybe just as an overseer – so you try and comprehend what they’re doing, watch the fingers, watch the gaps, try and recognise keys and notes at speed and reverse the learning process and before you know it you’re understanding, you’re faltering, your muscles had the knowledge and mind baulks at how to make your digits count time over ivory. And it all goes to shit. Discordant, ugly shit. So if my fingers run away from me at any point here, please forgive their meandering – I won’t hinder their progress, for sometimes the flesh knows best.

When I previously tried to begin this post last week, I started with something like this. On age v experience: living with two professionals in their thirties and working with experienced other-generation pros, my relative lack of age and experience is sometimes a niggle in my mind and a joke in others’ mouths. It has ground away at me lugubrious as diamond sludge, catching my attention, oozing abrasively through my mind until it began to smart. I don’t know how to begin phrasing the bloody welter of responses that gradually ensued, but I’ll start with a massively egotistical quotation from one of my own poems – The Voice of Reason, which is in the blog post of the same name if you fancy a read. So, in the words of a beleaguered 2007 me:

‘In every minute born a different self

That knows, that’s slipped, that is in no way better –

For every truth hard gained, I’ve lost sweet lies.’

The poem was inspired by a debate with a philosophy and literature student on the merits of thorough research. But it became something more – some testament to innocence. I suspect I was being overly dramatic, but there ‘tis. And, two years on with a host of experiences both exquisite and massively destructive under my skin – I couldn’t agree more. I’m older, colder, I wax acidic, I’ve done things I’d never tell and others I can’t help but crow, and yet if I met the 2007 me I’m ashamed to say I’d look at those 2.5 years and lack of experiences I’d regard her as a lesser person. What utter fucking nonsense. What a shameful double standard. I will fight this inclination to patronisation and superfluous superiority.

Age is just a number. Oh, sometimes it counts, and mostly it is proportional to experience – makes sense, doesn’t it, the longer you’ve been living, breathing and seeing, the more you’ll have lived, breathed and seen. I remember writing to publishers when I wrote my fantasy novel at the tender age of 13. ‘Not enough life experience’ was the consensus. How I fumed. Did one need experience of the things we write about to imagine them? Did every crime writer know how it felt to cleave the flesh of another human, to feel their blood pump over gloved hands? Did every science fiction novelist know the feeling of a spaceship’s deck beneath their alien feet? Did Tolkien go around stabbing the hell out of balrogs on the occasional weekend? Didn’t think so then, and I don’t now. But, inevitably, more time, more experience, more people met and sights seen and words read and life tasted will mean richer writing. I get that.

But where I get confused, where people have a problem is in the qualification of experience. It’s obvious that the guys in the office who’ve been riding bikes for more than a decade than I have will be better at it – more time, more experience, and therefore better. It’s a no-brainer that I’ll have the edge in terms of time and experience of, say, writing poetry, considering the degree and all that. Where it becomes a brainer is in gauging the value of these things. In the job, experience of riding bikes and writing about them makes these people better and therefore employed as they are, and with every right to be at least a little patronising to me (which, considering the dropping of the BMW, they haven’t really taken me up on). It’ll also come in on a few other levels, like hobbies/sport/motoring prowess etc. And that’s it.

Where I start to chafe (apart from there, damn tight leathers) is at the assumption that people are miles apart in experience because of their age, setting a massive divide between generations. In fact, I don’t even like thinking about generations unless we’re talking granny/mother/daughter. People of any age, when faced with a younger person, will generally have a touch of the when-you-get-to-my-age-you’ll-know-betters. And in some things, they’ll be right. But I hate to see people of my age and below written off as only half-people because we haven’t been there and done it yet. Been where and done what, gramps? Been to a friend’s 70^th? Had a mortgage? Got married? Seen our children win a prize? Got that promotion to senior management?

The moments that define our personalities, that shape our lives, that determine Value of Experience can take anything from a second to a decade – or more. A simple example – one guy spends fifty years learning and practising to be the best guitarist in musical history. He does little else – and is rightly in a league of his own when it comes to the guitar. He is the most experienced guitarist ever. Another guy spends one year doing something different and becoming skilled at it every year for five decades. He’s done a year of guitar, and is nowhere like as skilled as Dude A. But he’s also done a year of surfing, of carpentry, of studying Mandarin, of winemaking, of accountancy, he’s spent a year in France, Cuba, Iceland and Russia, he’s…well, you get the idea. Overly simple example – who’s the most experienced after 50 years? Either? Neither? One or the other? What if Mister B only spends 5 years studying different disciplines? What if he spends a week doing something different every week for a year, and then meets Fellow A? What is A going to say to him, at a possible 55 to B’s 17? ‘When you get to my age…’ what? ‘You’ll be so much more real than I ever was? You already are?’

So leaving the oversimplification for something a little more tangible, yes, those important moments can take any amount of time. In the two years since I wrote that poem I’ve watched one of my grandparents decline into Alzheimer’s, senility and death over more than a year. A year – and it was a terrible, eye-opening, memory-threatening, hope-destroying cycle of days and weeks and months. Yet I’ve also spent a drunken night with someone who really should have known better – night’s less appropriate than ‘hour’, one hour that’s left me with a cankerous weal of shame, rage and secrecy that I can never, ever undo. And the hour-later Me would eye the hour-before Me with a bitter glare that said ‘You!- innocent, naïve youngster, you don’t know. When you get to my age, just 59 minutes from now…’

I suppose what I’m missing is that generally the age/experience differential is just fact. It’s evident – made-up, ties off – in the arrogance of every older year of kids at school. It’s there true and tender in the advice of a parent to a child, who knows it really will feel better in the morning. It was there last night when a friend and I cooed at some liberally pierced youths at a fast-food counter, warning them of possible interview-related predicaments.

Age is just a number – similar (though not identical) to gender, build, race, or hair-colour in its importance towards judging another person. I don’t want to be wary – or embarrassed – by saying I’m 22, any more than I would be saying I’m a woman, a Libra, a natural brunette or a zealous cheese aficionado. I’m 22. I’ve visited over 20 countries, given up my happiness for that of strangers, and committed acts that I’ve loathed others for. I’ve been kicked in the head and I’ve danced for money. I’ve felt love so potently searing it’s driven tears from my eyes and howls from my throat. I’ve played the sax, played chess, played with people’s future happiness. I’ve swum with sharks and sprinted from spiders. I’ve been through physical and mental pain great enough to make me long for death. I’ve stolen, lied and cheated with a huge grin on my face. I’ve eaten at the Ritz, written a book, had sex in the rain and died my hair purple. I’ve a to-do list as tall as my tales. I am 22 – and in three months’ time, when I’m back from a summer of what promises to be incredible Experience, I’ll look at myself now and pity the poor child that I was.

So this rambling’s gone on quite long enough. I guess what I’m trying to say is: let experience be the decider, not age. I’ll try to do the same.

- The Current Cad

NB Though I'm tired and I really don't have the energy to re-read this before posting, I'm aware that I might be coming across as a self-absorbed jerk. Apologies if that's the case, lots of first person will do that to you. I've purposefully not made reference to the hundreds of thousands of people all over the world that go through massive, life-changing, embittering trials each day - I know they're there. As and when I meet them I'll sympathise with, be enthralled and astonished by their experiences. But I've only got my own - and a choice few - to go on right now, see?