Some Brief Reflections on Age and Living
This is a wonderful piece by writer Ginger Cook. It is her self-reflection(poem included) on turning 40. Strange, she feels like 40 is a huge “old-person” sign. I have always considered age 40 pretty young, especially considering more people living on average into their eighties around the world. Goodness, in Hong Kong and Japan the life expectancy(which is basically a statistical average) is now 85 or more! And considering Cook’s humorous piece about approaching middle-age, isn’t it funny that a current term for older millennials entering middle age is “elder millennial” or even “geriatric millennial” (as one viral Medium writer joked)? Meanwhile, in the U.S., the current POTUS, Speaker of the House, and President Pro-Tempere of the Senate are all double the age of the older millennials and are often termed the “youngest of the Silent Generation.” Talk about oxymorons!
I know age isn’t everything(as we hear all the time those common maxims that it’s making the most of everyday and living each second to the fullest). But let me just repeat, age 40 is certainly quite young. I can certainly relate, however, to Cook’s lamenting of life going by so fast. “Yesterday I was 18,” she identifies in the title before exploring other complex inquiries like changing physical traits. I often find myself thinking how I feel exactly like my 17-year-old self, but just with 20 years experience. It’s not that I don’t identify with my 12-year-old self or my 25 year-old-self, but just that I feel at age 17 I had reached a peak where I was the best version of myself making the most of my time and enjoying life fully. Next month, I’ll be 38 and well on my path to 40. Have I been living as fully as I can? That is the question I’ll certainly be asking myself as the years keep passing by.
In the past several years of my thirties I have certainly strived to make the most of life. I’ve continued to grow in my marriage, family relationships, and friendships. My professional life has certainly taken me to many new paths and angles I’d never have dreamed of in my late teens or twenties. I went from working third shift at a grocery store in my late-twenties to working as a customer service representative in the insurance and financial services industries. Talk about a change of scenery! And I made a decision to really carve out renewed meaning and purpose into my life over the past several years. I’ve made a new tradition of taking small “destination travels” each year to nearby interesting or quaint places. I’ve found new volunteer and service roles. And there is still so much more I have yet to do. I am just beginning.
I’ve been pondering and revisiting these topics of age, life journeys, and fulfillment for many years. Research led me to amazing works like this one from British writer Miranda Sawyer and this Huffington Post blog from Maria Gagliano. Although both these pieces are now both averaging a decade since print, their musings prove timeless. In the first piece, Sawyer contemplates the question of how do you come to terms with life as you tiptoe up to, and then past, its midpoint? And the second by Gagliano can really be used by all as they ask “how do you not feel ‘old‘”’ when you hit new milestones like 30, 40, and (and even 50, 60, 80, and beyond in the case of Gagliano’s grandmother)?” Both pieces prescribe a mixture of enjoying the present but also looking forward to the future to come.
“Live in the present” is a common maxim that is difficult enough to follow. However, the equally present maxim “look forward and prepare for the future,” is equally challenging. As human beings, we have a unique ability to envision the future that we know hasn’t fully formed yet. And no matter what our age, we can look forward to future years or decades for our own lives and also to the many eons to come for the world at large. In this sense, one could argue that every age is still relatively young in relation to what is to come. For instance, someone who reaches 80 could envision living even another ten years or longer, as Oliver Sacks envisoned when he reached this milestone: “ Perhaps, with luck, I will make it, more or less intact, for another few years and be granted the liberty to continue to love and work.” Tragically, the highly acclaimed and brilliant Sacks passed away just a couple years later in 2015, dying younger than many like his father who lived to early nineties.
Whether we are at life’s beginning, midpoint, or in later years, we can take to heart the maxim, “everyday is the first of the rest of your life.” This easily translates to every new age reached as “the first year in the rest of your life.” How wonderful the existential and spiritual meaning and value this viewpoint can bring — prescribing the utmost importance of living each day to the fullest while keeping in heart the hope and joy for amazing times to come. And whether we are age 38, 40, 75, or 98, we can find our present day lives with the promise of boundless tomorrows to stretch out to the greater life of humanity, the Earth, and even the cosmos(and this can be approached and understood from countless different angles also). As Walt Whitman so majestically stated in Leaves of Grass: “You shall possess the good of the earth and sun . . . . there are millions of suns left.”
