Fun!

I went yesterday to a funeral of a woman I admire greatly. She was ninety-five years old when she died - but wow! How she'd lived those ninety-five years!

Her contemporaries didn't seem to find the story of her life particularly unusual because, of course, they'd lived similarly full and exciting lives.  But the effect on the young adults present was electrifying! It was one which has led me down several different paths. And of course the one I've taken is idiosyncratic: - I've come to feel desperately sorry for them!

That was a feeling I'd begun to experience when I first came across the phrase "wild swimming."

 It was not, as I was imagining it, some 'Ancient Briton'  re-enactment; or people covered in mud and feathers and tribal costumes leaping off cliffs into distant pools. It was a word purely coined to refer to the act of propelling oneself through any body of water which is not the sea or a swimming pool.

The idea that jumping into a swimming hole, sliding into a stream, leaping into a snow chilled river on a hot day ever appeared to anyone as "wild" saddened me immeasurably. The fact that enough people existed to actually produce a neologism such as 'wild swimming' made me rethink a few things.

I may not be ninety-five but I've wrung more fun and excitement (and achievemnts!)out of my life than many people, I realise, now believe could ever be fitted in to a life-span!  I don't think about myself as unusual in that respect because, obviously, I didn't do that solo. I did that in either a place or a time where protection and oversight of our lives hadn't made us safe. We had fun!

Before I came to the UK I'd done things like: wading, with a WW2 aviation expert, through leech-infested swamps in the jungle, in my school holidays looking for WW2 aeroplanes in Papua New Guinea. No committees, groups, permissions (except from my parents), no special "jungle gear" , or Statements of Intent. It was fun.

 When I was newly married we used to go out with another couple into the mountains around Canberra & NSW, - no cell-phones, no special gear, no permission, to go exploring the cave system - finding huge bat-caverns like cathedrals, following promising tunnels till we were crawling on our bellies in single file (and yeah! someone always farts!)But it was always fun!

Your friends  threw you over the side with your weights and tanks to begin scuba diving. And if, like me, they'd put one of their own weight belts on you and you sank to the bottom like a stone, you sat in the dappled sunlight coming down through the water, until someone came and got you. It was fun making them pay for it later!

 If someone threw you the keys to a bus and asked you to drive tourists down a notorious mountain-side on an unsealed road, you had a quick run-through of the gears, moved the seat forward and got on with it.O.K. - so terrifying. But what fun it is telling that tale!

 You didn't stop your search for a mate when a rushing torrent intervened, you parked the car, threw a rope across for someone there to catch, and you pulled yourself across.Exhillerating fun!

You didn't stop playing cards when an earth-quake happened, you hung on like grim death and threw your winning hand down in triumph. 'Special fun because you'd been scamming the all-male poker team with the dewy-eyed beginner act and now you could 'fess up triumphantly!!

The approach to life was learning for oneself to deal with risk-taking - not pre-empting the need ever to risk-take. And if you took the wrong risk - well that's what the Darwin Awards are for.

There are - or at least there were until I came here six years ago - places all over the world where this lawless, dangerous ethos still pertains. But now that I actually live in England, I realise for the first time, how widely, madly, fundamentally, my whole approach to life differs to that of most of the people around me!

It's a shock to me to realise that, if ever the conversation strays to any time before 2013, my life is going to seem as strange, as unbelievable, as different as the life of those who lived through the Depression, WW2, the rise of female empowerment! Those women of the past who were able to involve themselves with the many, diverse activities & achievements of  women who lived before the initials H & S would have been had more meaning than as a putative business name!

I feel even sadder to see whole generations being left thus with the idea that  'fun' is something that is produced through drugs and alcohol.

While, if I let the idea intrude too much, it's sadder than everything else to think that so many people would judge my life as that of an irresponsible and selfish person whom their children should avoid because she has no sense of responsibility!