Once upon a time I was young
…and I didn’t know anything. I thought I knew everything, (a regular part of being young) I didn’t, but I did know one thing. That was to listen. Once again this is perhaps as symptom of being born when I was. Seen but not heard was a regular maxim in my home and at school. Upon reaching my teen years I learned from listening, but this time it was from bands like The Who “Hope I die before I get old” and “Don’t get fooled again.” This was the start of my “problems with authority”
Oddly I am left with an interesting point of view. I am a good, but skeptical listener. It has taught me to listen to what anyone has to say, evaluate it and the decide if the knowledge is useful, no matter what the source.
Which (finally) brings me to the point of this post.
The young have a great deal to learn from those with more experience. I know that I have learned so much from people older than myself. But I find that in the kink world often the older kinksters can be exclude by events like “The Under 35 Munch” It has been something I have heard time and time again from my peers. “I stopped going to that munch, it was full of the young and beautiful and I felt shunned” and that is a damn shame. I know people of a younger generation often feel that we can’t relate to their situation because the world is so very different now than it was in the past, and in some circumstance they are right, but that doesn’t mean we have nothing to offer the new kinksters of today. Often we have been through the very circumstances and issues that they are going through now. Hell even if you only look at the fact that someone may have been rigging/flogging/whipping/anything for decades might indicate they have information worth sharing.
Now, to you my peers, yes I am looking at you! Don’t you dare think that simply because you have been spanking bottoms for four score and seven years that you can’t learn something from the young. I have learned some amazing things from people that are half my age. Some these people have spent thousands of hours honing their skills while you have been stuck in a rut. Watch them, listen to them, talk to them and most importantly treat them as peers. If you look down on someone merely because of their age, or worse dismiss them with a “This is just how it has always been done” then you deserve to be left behind as a relic.
A persons age does not define their value, whether they are “wet behind the ears” or “long in the tooth”
Many people come to me for kink advice or suggestions. They see my age and make assumptions about my experience and often they are surprised that they have been in the kink lifestyle longer than I have. Wisdom isn’t the default that comes with age, I know many older people who have no clue at all, and being young does not preclude you from being wise. So lets remember we all have something valuable to share and that is what community is for sharing what we have learned.
Michael (the old guy in this parable)
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