The way I see it, there is a great pair of jokes played by
nature on us humans. Tricks of time: one cruel and the other almost cool enough
to make up for it.
First of all, why is it that time speeds up so much as we
get older? It’s so damned unfair. When we’re young and impatient for the things
we look forward to, time crawls at a snail’s pace. A week can feel like a month,
an hour can feel like half the day... until school is out, or we can have
dessert, or get to see that movie that’s been advertised forever.
We get older and time speeds up. It’s easier to wait for
what we want. We have more patience, and more perspective, it seems. It feels
like maturity. But then, that speeding up continues. And continues. Even
accelerates. We get into our thirties and we begin to want to slow things down
a little. We begin to realize that the longevity that has stretched into the dim
future all our lives is not infinite. We’re already into adulthood – that period
of time we were desperate for as children – and now it’s speeding by. Our
twenties are already behind us, and the years are only running by faster.
I’m into my sixties, and every year seems to last about as
long as a month once did. Whatever there is still to do in life, I’d better get
to it pretty damned fast, because memory and energy are diminishing as fast as
my future.
But, there’s the silver lining. It’s how wonderful it is
being an older human being. When I was a teenager, I imagined that the best
part of life ended by age fifty, if that. People that age and older seemed to
be mostly worn out and used up. I didn’t imagine there could be any real
pleasure is being alive at that age. I figured that what kept them going was
mostly the dread of the alternative. Wasn’t much to look forward to, so I didn’t
think a lot about being older. In fact, I somehow didn’t expect to become an
old man. Something would surely save me from the fate of being among the living
dead.
But it isn’t like that at all.
Being old doesn’t feel much different than being younger. Sure, the body doesn’t
work as well as it did, and I’ve noticed that I’ve begun to shrink, but there
are so many ways in which life is better. That’s the wonderful joke of nature.
The most surprising thing is that I feel like the very same
person I was in my twenties and thirties, but all the experience and choices of
the past have begun to pay off. They haven’t all been good experiences and
choices, of course, but bad ones have led to better ones, and the good ones
have given me so many tools for facing the present in ways I couldn’t before.
Patience and perspective are part of the story. But there’s also the shifting
of priorities and appetites. I want better things than I used to. And my values
are an outgrowth of lived experience, and are therefore more solid and reliable
than the values that were so much generated by the noise of the world. And these days, the
worth of a choice stems more from its generation than from its consequences.
I’m deep into the second half of my life, possibly into the
fourth quarter. I don’t project a lot about what the rest of life will be like.
Will the acceleration of time continue? Will life continue to feel this good? Experience confirms that projections can be
very wrong. And even if they're right, it’s probably best not to live inside of them. I
have foreseen so much pain and difficulty where there turned out not to be any.
I’m sure curious though. And I’ll try to make the best of
whatever comes. I know from experience that there will be constant surprises.
Every day is full of them.
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