The Goldenest Age

Last summer I took a solo trip to the gas station to fill up my mother-in-law’s car while she was here visiting. Since I didn’t have any cassette tapes with me, I ended up scanning the radio stations and ended up listening to the tail end of “Prairie Home Companion”, which I’d never heard before, aside from sitting through the movie, which most people will agree doesn’t count. One thing in particular struck me about Garrison Keiller’s monologue, which happened to be about strawberries, and that was the sound of his live audience. I’m guessing that most of the people who attend his shows are well over 50, and if that’s the case, then I have to report that you can’t determine the age of a person by the sound of their laughter. It could very well have been a crowd of (admittedly, low-key) twentysomethings listening to him, judging by their collective sound.

It got me thinking about external versus internal age, and as I creep further into the territory where it’s more and more common for me to clearly recall things that happened thirty years ago(!), I’ve decided that where I am, here just over forty, is actually a great place to be. There are spectrums of attitude that we move along as we get older, and they all seem to progress from being in a “collective” state to being in a “reflective” state. By this, I mean that we start out primed to accumulate experiences, while the older we get, we tend to get just as much – if not more -- enjoyment from remembering and assimilating those experiences.

What comes to mind when I say that is a writing project that my cousin and I undertook when we were in our twenties. We traded off writing short chapters of a weird fantasy novel, and a pattern quickly developed… my cousin would add these wildly, seemingly tangential plot twists into the mix, and I would then spend the next chapter figuring out how to fold it into the canon of what we had already written. Clearly, he loved the freedom of taking whatever creative idea his mind latched onto and lobbing it to me, and I loved making it fit into the existing story. It tells a lot about our personalities, I think, and also illustrates the difference between the “collective” and “reflective” states that I mentioned. Oh, and by the way, we’re starting to undertake this experiment again, now in our forties.

We’re definitely most collective when we’re young. At fifteen, the only thing that matters is what’s new, what’s got buzz, what can we be the first to experience. That feeling comes at a time when we’re still restricted in where we can go and what we can do -- and rightly so, since we still think we’re invincible. This fact might be ironic, or it might even be fuel for the fire. At the other end, late in life, is the reflective state, something that I’ve seen in older people. It’s the familiar warmth of cloaking yourself in a cloud of nostalgia, where you can sit back and reminisce, editing your own life for clarity and content, figuring out where later developments originated from, where your most formulative moments occurred. While there’s a danger to being too adventurous when you’re young, there’s also a danger in old age. Sometimes that web of recollection gets so thick that not even a hint of anything new comes in. I doubt that a typical person of eighty-five lives in a world that has changed more than marginally since they were seventy-five, no matter how much the world has moved on in the interim. In these cases, there’s such an accumulation of life, things and places and people to love and sift through at will, that there’s hardly any room for more.

At forty, I’m realizing that I’m poised on the tipping point between these two states, able to appreciate the value of nostalgia, but also still itching to see what the next thing coming around the corner is. Music, for example. I’ve got a long YouTube “watch it later” assortment of new music that I want to give a listen, but at the same time I’m also happy to spend an afternoon letting an 80s playlist randomize on my music player.

There are other spectra of experience I started thinking about too, and the longer I look at them, the more they all seem to converge right around this spot where I stand. For another example, I’m just as likely to enjoy travel and action over staying at home relaxing... I probably naturally passed that point back when I was twenty-five, but it’s been revitalized thanks to a four-year-old who makes it almost impossible to sit for an extended period of time. Now there’s a reason to head to the park, or the pool, or the zoo, which just makes me remember how much fun it is to go out and be collective again.

Relationships are yet another vector. Youth is full of passion, the headlong rush to get to Whatever’s Going to Happen Next, a relentless exploration of everything love has to offer, quiet moments of intimacy interspersed among days and evenings full of raucous adventure and uncertainty. Later on, though, it’s the slower shared moments that matter, the ease of being who you truly are with the person you love, without the pressure of having to be anyone else other than who you are, even that means sitting and not having to say anything. From where I stand, I can feel the pull of both, being both beckoned forward and eased back in equal measure.

Of course, I don’t know whether the vantage point I have is unique, or if everyone feels this way at some particular point in their lives. I suppose the ideal thing would be to stay in this state as long as possible. There must be some people who out there who spend the majority of their lives in it. I’m resolved to do just that, to stay in it as long as I can. It’s really having the best of both worlds, isn’t it, the constant process of accumulating and assimilating all at once?