On being knacky

Life is knacky.

Knacks (skills or talent, if you prefer) can take years to develop but any of us can attain a few of them. It doesn't have to be brain surgery, it can be for a card trick or getting your key in your front door at the first time of asking.

You develop these knacks, then perhaps you hope to sell them. You are skilled are what you do, it gives you confidence, it becomes a part small or large or, if you overshoot, perhaps even all, of your identity. That is your identity in the eyes of yourself, those around you and those whose respect you may crave.

But your knack may go out of date.

All that time, lost.

All that skill, redundant.

You, irrelevant.

And it's even worse than that. You may have adopted your knack to the exclusion of other things. Exercise you sure should have embarked on, that guitar you never picked up, those classics you never read.

Are you are okay with that?

Because if not, now is the time to say.

And your wondrous knacks give you such estate, such clarity, the confirmation that reality you are a cut above. A cut above the rank-and-file, the plebs, (as our current Conservative Chief Whip might volunteer). Their wonderful symmetry is a sign that all is well with the world.

But all is not well with the world.

Or haven't you noticed?

If you're the expert in a certain type of brain surgery that becomes redundant, what are you going to do? Throw yourself off the nearest bridge after your latest divorce because of your loss of identity, employability, hard cash?

Another conclusion I've made on my travels is whatever habits, tendencies, regular practices you do adopt, you might choose to examine them regularly. Clean out your cupboards! Cull, kill, be as ruthless as you like. 

Look at what the green-fingered folk do to roses in winter. Has a single one of them ever been arrested? Well they should be!

Trim, prune, recast your rod.

Even if you have a metaphor that you're happy with, mix it up with something nonsensical. You might discover a new idea.

Human beings are pattern machines.

We make them, but not as many as we'd like.

And we break them, but not as often as we should.

New tricks are good, our generation can no longer sit on our laurels.

Knacks take years to develop.

Best start now.