What If?

I’ve got a confession to make. I’m in my early thirties, I have a wife and kids and a fairly responsible job, and for the vast majority of the time I’m winging it. I am technically a grown up. In 2010, whilst loading a pram into the back of our second-hand Skoda I felt the last vestiges of my youth float up into the ether. And from that moment on, I’ve been waiting.

Waiting for someone to sit me down and explain to me what it is to be grown up. To talk through tracker mortgages, self-assessment forms and school catchment areas. To explain pensions, life insurance and to tell me how to bleed a radiator. To give me a card I can keep in my wallet that says “Adult”. One that I can look at every now and then say to myself “Don’t stress about it, you’ve got this”.

I’m starting to think it isn’t ever going to happen. That I’ll go through life an imposter: busking-it, making it up on-the-hoof, a joker in a world of sober-suited professionals with “5 year plans”.

But then it happened. In the local soft-play. Trying to ensure my kids emerged with an appropriate number of limbs and no serious head trauma, I caught the eye of other parents. And I saw the fear. The same fear I was feeling. That look of “I’ve absolutely no idea what I’m doing”.

And once you notice it, you see it all the time.Lawyers, bankers, sportspeople. Even politicians. We’re cast adrift in the Milky Way, spinning at millions of miles per hour, on a tiny rock populated by ad-libbers.

As kids we spend most of our time trying to hurry things up, longing to become our own masters, ready to take control of our own destinies, to have responsibilities. As an ‘adult’ I’d be happy to offload some. What if the things I was so certain about as a child aren’t true? For starters, I’ve got my doubts about the whole Santa thing.

And what if those in charge of us are just winging it too? What if they don’t necessarily always act in our interests? It always seemed to me that maybe the financial difficulties we’re in were somehow the fault of the rich, the 1% gambling away our money in pursuit of the capitalist dream. But according to the government it’s the fault of the poor. Who knew?

The poor, those people before the crash without any money, and who still seem to have no money – it was them all along. Bloody typical. That single Mum on benefits with 30 kids, and the kids are all on benefits, and they have kids and they’re all on benefits, and they have a pet dolphin and he’s on benefits, and she writes to the council to get a house with a swimming pool because of the dolphin, and the kids get pink-eye from the pool and she sues the government for millions. Maybe that’s not true? What if we shouldn’t always believe those stories? What if the people who we pay a little bit to help, really need our help? What if it’s the right thing to do because we’re all just a few bad breaks away from help ourselves? 

What if there’s something wrong with a government that refuses haven for 3000 unaccompanied child refugees because we don’t have the resources, in a country that has a pop-up brunch restaurant for dogs? What if we replaced fear with compassion? What if doctors and nurses do their jobs because they want to help people? What if the people best placed to educate our kids are teachers? What if public services are needed because having a happy, healthy, educated population benefits us all?

Maybe the most dangerous thing is perceived certainty, unjustified certainty, imposed certainty. Ideology. What if we just embrace the unplanned, the ad-libbed, the improvised? What if we just accept we may never have all the answers? What if we say that the only certainty is that we’re stuck here, now, with each other, and we might as well make the best of it. Because it’s the only chance we’re going to get.

Maybe next time my son asks me something I should say “Honestly, I’ve got no idea. But life’s a wonderful adventure, let’s try and work it out together”

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