Aging anxieties 🎂
FROM ABOUT 18 TO 26 all anxieties were about what I would do with myself, until very suddenly, those anxieties shifted from, “what do I do with my life?” to “what I have done with my life?”
I’m sitting here in the alps in Switzerland. Soft German sounds politely float by. This restaurant serves bratwurst and coffee for about thirty francs—it’s the retail price of neutrality. This is my view from where I am writing.
I flew Swiss Air and they tried to sell me a watch on the plane. Funny enough, all that neutrality and they’re absolute Nazis about being on time. If you’re late to anything they call the police. If the Americans were any more late to the War, they would have been charging us interest to keep German gold. It was foggy on the way up here to the alps in Saas-Fee. An old hiker I shared a gondola with asked me what I thought of the fogged view, and I said, “what view?” and he said, “no view is the view.” They speak in those funny little impromptu proverbs, the Swiss.
But there are only so many life lessons a human being can possess in one day. Wisdom can be a great hobby if you don’t implement all of them. Once implemented, it becomes a job. So, I’ve been trying to quit advice-receiving and instead try dumb bliss. It’s not working too well and the reason is the Fear of Missing Out. As an absent practitioner of blind joy, I can’t help but wonder if the smarter, sadder folk have a point. So, I slip back into smarter, sadder ways and contemplate what I’d been putting off contemplating out of fear that I’m missing something. Here it goes.
I HAVE RECENTLY gone through one of the most dramatic changes in my life via breaking up with a woman I was engaged to. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my short, stupid, recently twenty-eight-year life. The reasons are not obvious, but it had to happen. It was the right thing to do, and yet the guilt of breaking someone’s heart, especially one that loved me so much, is something I’m not sure if even time can repair. I know it will, but for now it feels like it won’t. Time has a funny way of doing business like that. I’m all blocked up emotionally—lots of practice—so it hurt all at once, and then nothing at all for a while.
The real hurt only comes when life gets a little good again. The default position that nothing mattered and that time is big and that the plight of two people, “don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world,” worked well. Sophomoric nihilism served me well. By rejecting the good, the hurt had no chance of entering.
But when hope creeps back into the picture, things begin to matter again. One person can open that up again. The laughs come back, new friendships happen, I start playing tennis, Dunkin drops a new donut and WHAM—life found a way back in. Suddenly the world isn’t so big, time isn’t so long, and we’re more than just a pale blue dot floating in space dust. When it feels like life matters again, we come to terms with the fact that we have a profound effect on people’s timelines. If we allow the good, we allow the hurt in equal amounts. Those are the rules. The consequences of our choices are no longer carried by just us. Whether we like it or not, everyone who cares about us are pulled along by the thread that attaches us to them. Sudden movements will tighten those threads and tug them along into directions we don’t mean to pull them into.
THE WORLD IS either way too big for us, or not so big at all. I keep fluctuating between the close-up and the wide shot. In the wide shot, it’s pretty dumb to be think about me, myself, and moi as important in any way. In the close-up, it’s not so dumb. People change, hearts break and grow back, we hurt ourselves, find ourselves, finally find the mercy to feel sorry for ourselves, to eat ice cream on an October day, tea and toast in the morning when a string of sun sprouts into the window just right, a funny video sent by a friend because they couldn’t say “I love you” out loud. I’m trying to find that medium shot. It’s hard with an infinite amount of space between the wide and the close up. Whatever you call “medium” is going to be one of the most significant choices you can make.
It has been a few months since that breakup and one piece of life lesson I kept from the whole thing was to feel what needs to be felt and think what needs to be thought. Humans are specialists at not feeling hurt. We come up with all sorts of sophisticated ways to avoid pain and in that avoidance we harden. The answer, I think (but I’m really guessing), is to build the muscle of resilience. Not avoid the hurt, but to be hurt and get back up again, and again, and again. Resilience has a twinge of hope to it, a knowing that things will be okay in the future. The important thing is to remain gentle.
I TURN TWENTY-EIGHT today, on Halloween, and my dentist was the first to wish me pleasantries. My anxieties already have shifted from “what will I do,” to “what have I done?” about a year ago. I hope I’ll add as much good to at least one someone’s life as many someone’s have added to mine. Some days I feel like I remember everything I ever did. This has been a most eventful year; a million miles an hour to nowhere. In a time capsule somewhere on this pale blue dot, this all made sense, whether we suffer so the good parts have meaning or if the good parts get us through the bad. Willie Nelson said we sing the blues to vanish the blues. Maybe we cry to vanish the crying and hurt to vanish the hurt. It’s why we say, “see you later,” even as a lie. It’s easier that way.
A herd of goats with bells around their necks are trotting by now, all miraculously remaining on the dirt path while a shepherd gives them instructions in their native goat tongue. A couple in front of me are reading, not saying a word to each other. It is a good place to think and write honestly about change.
Everything is funny. Sadness, suddenly beautiful. To let it happen without fear of hurt. Is this just happiness in action? The thrill of creating. Precious ideas un-wasted, all expressed, breathing in and out, in and out, again, and again, and again.
Best Wishes,
americanbaron
You still have a lot of "what will I do?"s left. There will be plenty of time for "what have I done?"s later. ;) From my perspective, 28 is young. Which you will realize someday. (I just convinced myself that my 76 year old self will be very envious of my "young" 56 year old self of today). It's natural to spend your youth searching and finding your way. It's a time of possibilities and anxieties. That doesn't last forever - which is both good and bad. In the close up view of day to day life, we are fooled into thinking "this is how it is". Nobody expects the chapter to end. But it does, and a new one starts. And then we think again "this is how it is" and fool ourselves into thinking this is how it will always be. But the chapters stack up and time passes faster and faster. The struggle of youth is the journey to find yourself (I don't miss that). The benefit of being older, is that you can just start savoring each day. Which is what I try to do every day. Happy Birthday from one young man to another. :)
I missed your writing, thank you for sharing this today. and happy birthday :) I also had a birthday last week and I'm working on feeling what needs to be felt and thinking what needs to be thought, because it hits differently when you're a 'year' older. Hoping we both find that medium shot soon.
When you're done being swissbaron and back to being austinbaron, let's grab a drink or ice cream and talk about manly things like feelings and love and tennis.