500 Words a Week - Are we being pushed to the side?

“Something is pushing them

To the side of their own lives.”

- “Afternoons” by Philip Larkin

The above quote was mentioned in a podcast I listened to recently. Upon hearing it, and then reading the poem, it is something that has resonated with me, and I keep thinking about. Many of my previous blogs have been around agency, around setting the standards of our own life, of defining what success means to us rather than allowing others to define it for us. If we don’t keep topics such as this in mind, we can then be guilty of being pushed to the side of our life. We might also feel that everything we are currently prioritizing is being told to us, again leading us to the feeling of being pushed to the side.

In the podcast, Douglas Murray describes how this line means to him that there’s a life you hoped to live, that you saw yourself living, and you’ve been push to the side of it and ended up not living it.

I found it hard to fully grasp and interpret the above quote from Philip, but I’ve gathered the following. We have to work, and in the majority of cases work controls our schedule. When I first read the above, I was immediately struck by the thought am I being pushed to the side because I’m not in control of my schedule. Upon further reflection, I think it’s more to do with how we perceive and go about aspects of our life.

If we live our life on autopilot, going through the day-to-day motions as if we are driftwood being pulled along by the current, then I do believe we are being pushed to the side. When we aren’t conscious of what’s happening to us and aren’t aware of how each decision we make impacts our circumstances, then we are being pushed to the side. If we play the part of the innocent bystander, allowing everything to be dictated to us, we are being pushed to the side. Which then is accompanied by feelings of angst, of no control, of despair.

Rather, if we control our outlook, if we are conscious and aware of what we are doing and understand how the decisions we make on a daily basis affect our lives far more than we realise. We begin to become more in control. We begin to be in the centre frame. No longer driftwood, but a person gently paddling their way down a stream of their choosing.