My Operating System is Out of Date

Barbara Kingsolver has always been one of my favourite authors from her early novels like The Bean Trees to a collection of essays on motherhood in High Tide in Tuscon and her foray into non-fiction in Animal Vegetable Miracle but I stumbled across the website The Daily Good and a Convocation address she gave in 2008 and it really resonated with middle-aged me.

"Because of your age." It's okay now to deck out and turn up as the village idiot. Hooray! I am old enough. How does this happen? Over a certain age, do you become invisible? There is considerable evidence for this in movies and television. But mainly, I think, you're not expected to know the rules. Everyone knows you're operating on software that hasn't been updated for a good while."


That just about sums up how I am feeling these days, like my software needs an upgrade. Of course the rest of the address goes much deeper into where our world is headed and she is rather prophetic seeing what has been happening in the last few months.