If I were to initiate such a blog, I might start with two things I saw today. One a blog entry and another from the Chicago Tribune.
Mary Schmich reflects on aging in her Tribune piece today:
`We don't look as old as they do, do we?" muttered my old college friend. It was reunion weekend and we were walking toward a group of alumni gathered on a lawn.I still hate large reunions and probably always will but Schmich puts a pretty good spin on them. Maybe I'll reconsider the next one.
"Let's hope not," I muttered back, squinting at the class year scribbled on their name tags. "They're 20 years older than we are."
This is the kind of conversation heard all across America in the spring, the nation's official reunion season, a time when former classmates return to the alma mater seeking to answer life's deepest questions: How old do I look? How old do they look? We're not really this old, are we?
[snip]
But something funny happens after the shock of the initial reunion sightings and assessments. Once you match your youthful classmates with these middle-age relations, once you get used to the fact that time has robbed every single one of you of something--or added it in the wrong places--you stop noticing the thinning hair and padded waists, the doubled chins and rutted foreheads.
What you notice is the voice. The eyes. The hand gestures and the laugh. They're eerily unchanged. And though it's not visible to the current college kids who drift past thinking, "Geezers," before long, among yourselves, the younger selves are shining through.
[snip]
And you stop hearing the question that nagged before you came, "Why would I go to a reunion?" You know why now. It's not mostly to revisit memories. It's to share trip notes with your fellow travelers through time. It's to allow your fully alive but often hidden younger self back out on parade. That self can never be fully seen by people who know your past only through your stories.
We often measure our lives in events--the accumulation of things we do and things that happen to us. Reunions remind us that though events may polish us, dent us, turn us upside down or dress us up in different clothes, we are in some basic easure simply who we are. We still are who we were.
So when some reunion shutterbug says, "Smile," you do, with pleasure. And even though later when you see the pictures you'll see that, yeah, you all do look older, you'll also notice something really funny--those smiles have hardly changed at all.
Eric Zorn (also a Tribune writer, by the way) in his blog has some wise words form his mid-40s perspective.
I’ve never been asked to deliver a graduation speech --- hmm, I wonder why? -- but should some institution ever turn to me in a desperate hour, one of the things I would say is that, a long, long time from now, today will still feel like yesterday.Zorn includes a photo of himself on the day of his graduation from college in 1980. Look at all the hair. That's what I say when I look at photos my graduation day too. That and the old cliche, "where did the time go?"
You have no idea when you’re young how short a time a quarter of a century can be, how quickly it will all go, how you will still feel like very much the same person inside, yet others will see your face, your body and your circumstances and think of you as old, settled, declining.
[snip]
...savor the moments as much as possible, [make] the most of the time you’ve got.
Because before you know it you’ll be looking back over the decades at a photograph of your own fresh face and wondering if you even came close to living up to the promise that you had then and to following your ideals and your dreams.
You’ll reach these milestones of reckoning – if you’re lucky. You will hold yourself to account -- if you’re smart.
What will you say?
UPDATE: It occurs to me you know you're over 40 when you start looking for your friends in the obituaries rather than Police Beat.
No comments:
Post a Comment