Agency

I’ve started using this word a lot – agency. It’s got a clean, gleaming scientific shimmer about it. It feels modern and leading-edge and transparent.

Back in the eighties, my parents were friends with a very wealthy couple. They had a split level living room, an indoor swimming pool, a piano and two cars. They also had a bright and echoing room reserved for ballet. The room was dominated by a beam, and their eldest daughter, who was some three years older than me used to practice her moves on a Sunday morning kitted out in a frilly tutu and pink ballet tights. I had a bit of a crush on her and watching her do ballet was my 2nd favourite thing to do when we went to their house on the leafy outskirts of Birmingham for sleep overs.

My most favourite thing though, was to ride in their Peugeot 504.

My God, I loved that car, especially its electric windows and sunroof. I’d sit on the sweaty, caramel leather banquette of the back seat and flick the switch, enchanted, as the windows hummed up and down. They housed it in a little outdoor carport overlooked by giant Lebanese cedars that used to drip their needles onto its roof as I sat inside.

The word agency is just like those electric windows; futuristic, transparent.

And always just beyond my reach.

Agency is a technical term that describes the feeling of being in charge of your own life, knowing that you have a voice in, and some say in what happens in your life, together with the ability to influence its direction. It’s the precursor, I reckon, to your sense of being empowered in the world.

The more you’re able to exert your agency – whether by asking for a pay raise, finishing the album, moving to Paris, writing the novel, setting up the Not-for-Profit and taking it to the Palestinian West Bank, plotting a move to a commune in Pondicherry just south of Madras or making good your wacky idea of hitch-hiking across the Sahara with a clarinet – the more empowered you feel.

Yet having done all the things above, my sense of myself is of a person without agency. A person who is unable to make things happen in a lasting and meaningful way. Somebody who digs shallow holes in the earth. Because, having achieved all of the above, I yet find myself broke and broken, disorientated and discontented.

I ask myself, what is it that I’m missing?

And like a kaleidoscope, the question fans out in myriad directions, refracted by the light of inquiry.

Confusing me.

On the backseat of that Peugeot 504, things were much simpler.

The smell of the leather seats, the tink of falling needles, sunlight filtered through pines.

It was how happiness felt.

And safety.

And peace.