Sometimes the bad old days can feel quite good.
Because in the bad old days, everyone knew their place.
The social order didn’t allow for much movement so your position in society was fixed.
If you were a peasant’s son, a peasant you would be.
If you were born a woman, almost all paths of opportunity were blocked. Leave your dreams at the door.
Kings were divine; doctors were respected and labourers, just a pair of hands.
Things were different.
Men went off to die for their ruler’s egoic needs, without a question raised.
Women washed, cooked and scrubbed; rich women wrote letters.
Everyone knew their place: the rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate.
And knowing your place can save a great deal of angst.
These days, no one knows their place. Indeed, the very phrase, ‘know your place’ would be considered a gross and repressive throwback to some dark age of hierarchy.
I can feel my own revulsion at the phrase. Indeed, I have had it said to me, with polite menace: ‘Know your place, young man.’
The trouble is, though, if you aren’t given your place by society, you have to find it all by yourself… and this can be a major struggle, particularly, though not exclusively, for the young.
This is why everyone on X Factor is ‘on a journey’:
‘What is my place in the world? I need to find it!’
In the individualistic west, everyone has a dream they must realise to quieten the egoic scream for meaning.
The difficulty is that most dreams don’t come true. We don’t get whatever break we were looking for. So, the insecurity remains, which breeds disappointment, anxiety, trappedness and self-loathing.
These days, everyone (irony alert) sings along with Frank Sinatra, ‘I did it my way!’
But the anxiety as they attempt to do it ‘their way’ will be considerable, as they struggle to find their place in the world…a search that will coagulate around some achievement or other.
I meet with many gifted people. But they are crucified by their need to find a place, to live their dream, to achieve.
I know a man of thirty, who personally knows seven males of his age who have killed themselves in the last few years; the most recent, last week – a jump from Beachy Head. And it wasn’t poverty that drove them there.
They couldn’t find a place.
I remember, in my mid-forties, throwing away my place in the world. I left the priesthood, which gave me ‘a place’, and worked in a supermarket, where I was just a pair of hands.
But while my move shocked many, it made no existential difference to me. People treated me differently; but since others have never defined me, it felt no different at all. If anything, I felt freer.
I knew my place and it was unattached to achievement or status. It was an inner knowledge, a gnosis, untouched by exterior motifs.
This is not because I am special; far from it. I’m an ordinary fellow, average at most things, and happier for knowing that. I have one or two gifts which feel largely unfulfilled. But life lies not in our gift, but in the interim, the space between.
I know my place in the world. It’s a tiny place, but it’s my place.
I don’t know about tomorrow, because no one does; but today this place is home, with flowers in the window and a light on the stairs.
‘Know your place, young man!’
I do, thank you. I know my place; but more crucially, I accept my place, which strangely…
…is a daily catalyst for change.
