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The Beauty of Being Unseen
Middle-Aged Life’s Hidden Gems
Another birthday recently passed. I can’t tell you how much I hate birthdays. One reason is that it falls during the horrible perineum of Christmas and the New Year. The main reason though, is because it always provokes thoughts about how an updated school report would likely pronounce, ‘Beverley has never fulfilled her potential’.
Those thoughts always invade nights when I can’t sleep. And now I have nearly passed from middle-age to elderly, they often get their nasty claws into me during the day as well. A horrible shaming voice whispers, “You coulda been someone. You could have built something if only you’d had a good idea/stuck to that job/listened to that person/stayed in that marriage/etc.”
Anyway, during the annual birthday night-of-misery, I had a breakthrough. Okay, so I didn’t make it as a famous writer or famous anything. But I haven’t had such a bad life and there are advantages of remaining unseen and unnoticed in middle-age. I feverishly started running through them. Pretty soon, I was sitting up and writing them down.
It seems that the desire to be famous, to be ‘someone’ is all about feeling relevant. It’s as if the person wants to be fed with attention and that when that attention is taken away, their life becomes nothing. Have you noticed when famous actors are interviewed, they name-drop like crazy? Their lives would be irrelevant without the fame currency. Fame is an insatiable beastie.
“Those who try to outshine others dim their own light”.
The Tao Te Ching.
To some, it matters not how they acquire fame as long as they get it. There’s a young guy in the UK who thinks that pranking people is a great way to be famous. He filmed himself snatching a small dog from an elderly woman in a park. He approached the woman, made polite conversation, petted the little terrier, and then picked it up and ran away. She was distraught. And even though he returned the dog later, she will never forget that heart-wrenching moment when her beloved pet was taken.
He walked, with his buddy, into people’s homes uninvited, causing them terror at the sight of strangers in their kitchen. Again, they are…
