An Old Codger Beige

Why beige? Waiting in a coffee shop. Brown furniture. An idle mind wandering. No more, no less.

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Thinking about it now, I do enjoy where my mind will take me when I let my thoughts wander; when I reduce the amount of control I’m exerting.

That’s good. What’s better is that, increasingly, I’m comfortable to be idling in a kind of neutral – with nothing specific that I’m trying to think about. To do so is to take a risk. You might stay in neutral, but you might not.

Before the crash I’d be fine with that. Since the crash, I’ve been most-times fearful of where my mind might take me. I’m less fearful now. That can only be a product of time passing. Of brain cells repairing. Of finding I can manage my own reactions to unexpected thoughts occurring a little better now. Of having limited – guarded – trust in that ability.

An Old Codger Beige

Beige. Brown. Tan. A colour resolutely ‘old’ by association – old age, old people. Being old; looking old; feeling old.

Dressed in an unassuming old codger beige, with a washed-out pastel accompaniment.

Of course, if you take away imposed values and associations, colours are just a matter of personal taste.

But the imposed values and associations are all too real. These days almost anyone that’s old in society’s scheme of things is commonly, at best, deemed to be gently mockable. More often the old are deemed generally/vaguely depressing, bringing depressing problems in their wake. If you’re old, a degree famous and lucky you might gain ‘national treasure’ status … but you’ll still be old, with all the negatives. As a society we’re a long way from properly caring for our elderly, caring much about our elderly.

You have to ask why. All the experience and knowledge of the old. There’s so much to learn from, learn about. Personal or more broad, any history’s value lies in what you learn from it. A healthy society values all its members – and all of society would benefit from that.

Arguably … both beige and age are just fragments of a broader issue lurking: money. The baggage that comes with money is a distinct matter entirely.

With regards to the elderly specifically, you have to suspect that we’ve come to treat the old the way we do because as a group they either can’t or just don’t spend so much. Thus marketing people don’t like them. And so that ‘marketing view’ seeps into our lives in any number of ways; so it contaminates all our lives, diminishes all our lives.