“The new year arrived and I realized i lived past my relevance…”

A few weeks ago I came across the above quotation. Much to my embarrassment I didn’t note where it came from, but I get the feeling that it was the first line of a poem. The second part of this line – ‘…but not my usefulness’ is somewhat more hopeful, but it’s not what I want to talk about here. Be prepared – this is going to be a whiny old man post…

It resonated with me; I’m now 64 years old and it’s safe to say that my age has somewhat caught up with me in the last year or so, especially in matters of mobility. Nothing says ‘You’re getting old’ louder than the fusillade of cracks and grinding noises that come from my knees when I get up from a seated position!

A few years ago I realised that I was no longer ‘bleeding edge’ in what I did for work or hobbies. In fat, I wasn’t even cutting edge…in fact, I was as edgy as a wooden spoon. I was behind the trends in technology, and it didn’t even bother me.

I was always interested in technology – electronics and even home made simple computers – as a kid and a teenager in the 1960s and 1970s. I had a little workshop, a load of science hobbies, and on leaving university in 1982 hit the home computer craze in the 1980s and wrote a lot of articles, did a lot of trade shows, wrote books, was exposed to a lot of real leading edge stuff and generally worked at what I wanted to do. Looking back, pretty much peaked in my professional relevance in the late 1980s / early 1990s. By the time the first dot-com boom came along I was starting to lag behind. By the early 2000s I was working at what paid the bills rather than what ‘floated my boat’, so to say.

My wider ‘cultural’ life seemed to follow a similar trajectory. More than once I have been heard to grumble in the middle of the night ‘I could have been a contender’.

And this is how I’ve allowed myself to settle in to life through my 50s and in to my 60s. My spiritual / religious life has stayed strong, but I’ve increasingly felt irrelevant in all other aspects of my life. For several years I allowed myself to think that the reason for this slippage was ‘time’ – I didn’t have enough time to do the stuff that I wanted to do. The COVID pandemic knocked that on the head – I had several months of paid furlough with no expectations from the outside world at all, but still just frittered the time away.

I’m not even sure that I want to be ‘relevant’ – it does somewhat depend upon your definition of the word, I guess. One definition I came across was:

the degree to which something is related or useful to what is happening or being talked about. 

Once I started looking at it in this way, my perceived lack of relevance immediately made me ask the question “Relevant to what?” Am I wanting to be relevant to the times in which I live? My work? Can relevance apply to relationships? Is relevance actually by it’s nature a fleeting thing? Is it actually a natural progression that our ‘relevance’ declines as we age?

One thing that has always made me reach for my Rosary in my spiritual life is when someone suggests that the Church needs to be more ‘relevant’ to appeal to believers. I’ve always had a ‘gut reaction’ against this – at it’s heart the Christian church deals with issues that are, to me, eternal – the relationship of man to God and of people to each other.

Having pondered this afresh in recent weeks, I now begin to wonder whether I need to question what I actually MEAN when I use the word relevance in relation to myself.

I am starting to wonder whether the relevance that I am really worried about is my relevance to my own life. I know this sounds potty. At first glance, how can you become an irrelevancy to yourself?

Perhaps it’s when you allow your priorities to be set by others?

I have a soft spot for the old curmudgeon St Paul. In his letter to the Romans, he says:

“What I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do,”

Now – stay with me if we’re not religious. Paul states that it is his sinful nature that drives him like this. We might just as well say that it’s our human nature, and that nature is today influenced strongly by so many external influences that it’s surprising that any of us actually end up doing what we want to do, rather than doing what we must, should or ought to do.

Perhaps we become irrelevant to our own lives when we go through them driven by the needs and desires of others, our mangled dopamine pathways, our addictions, our fear of missing out?

Maybe the relevance I mourn is THIS relevance – the relevance of myself as an active agent in my own life?