OK!
All you faithful little tigers out there can at last heave a sigh of
relief: The tigereffect is back in the blogging seat.
Don’t roll your eyes boys and girls I know you want it.
It’s been a while, I admit and I take full responsibility for any
reader's deaths caused through the sustained pining away for more
insightful blog entries. Life can be cruel.
Today’s blopic concerns our innate tendency towards fear as we age.
In English, that means that our propensity to crap in our pants
increases in correlation with our age. And I’m not talking about
incontinence or the origins of Dr Whites. No, ladies and gentlemen,
Im talking about fearing more as we age.
For example, a 10 year old child will blissfully board an airplane,
his only concern being the sweet old lady next to him who smells
vaguely of potpourri and who seems to be going for the
how-many-mints-fit-in-a-10-year-old world record.
(The answer, by the way is 31 567 set by little Jimmy 'Roundmouth'
Jenkins on a British Airways flight from New York to London in 1992.
But more on that in another blog.)
In thirty years time, our same specimen is clutching his seat with
whitened knuckles and sweat beads forming on his forehead. And that’s
just in the taxi on the way to the airport.
At the tender age of 10, the thought of the engine falling off the
left wing, and the plane plummeting 30 000 feet in a blaze of fire
simply doesn’t cross his mind. At at the age of 30, we start having to
drug ourselves before we board so that we can bypass the horrors of
dying in a great fiery inferno. Instead the only drug induced dream
we have is of teletubbies. I’m not sure which is worse.
Nevertheless it seems that as we age we all tend to become more
cautious of life, and in doing, we start restricting possibility. And
what is life without possibility? Its arriving at your destination
all sweaty palmed - wishing you were that little mint smelling ten
year old whistling blissfully through customs.
