by dr ngo
Growing old is not entirely negative, though it certainly ain't for wusses. If I sounded angst-y in my last post, and even morbid in the comments, it's because I split up my reflections on age and happened to post the downside first.
One big advantage of aging is experience, and not only in the sense of being able to pontificate about how things were Back In The Day, pleasant though that pastime is. (Unlike the classic “we had it tougher than you” riff – best expressed by Monty Python, of course: – what I'm most conscious of is how much better off I was than today's youth are, particularly in going to college when there were still full-ride scholarships to be had [not just student loans] and the prospect of careers after we graduated. Those Were The Days, My Friends!)
Experience, of course, is supposed to protect one from repetition of errors, or at least ameliorate them: “Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other,” as Benjamin Franklin put it. But this itself is erroneous, or at least misleading, in my experience. One may indeed avoid repeating the same old blunders – though even this is far from automatic – but in this everchanging world there are always new and interesting ways to screw things up. To err is human, but to truly f**k up takes a computer.
What experience does provide, however, is a personal reservoir of Epic Past Failures, next to which any current crises fades into a minor distraction. When I was younger – and not just when I was actually young, either – I did things so stupid and so awful, encountered events so crushing, that at times I thought “I'll never survive this. Or if I do, I'll never dare show my face in public again.” Yet here I am.
Commit a social faux pas? Forget it. It's nothing compared to writing a sympathy note to a widow on the death of her beloved husband – an old family friend, in fact eponym – only to have him answer, because in fact it was the wife who had died. (Yes, I actually did that.) Drink too much at a party? At least this time I didn't wind up at home after a friend's birthday barbecue with no idea how I had driven there. (Fortunately, no one was hurt.) Get delayed several hours in an airport? Try spending 24 hours in a departure lounge (without food court or other amenities) at Sydney airport, sleeping on the floor, because there had been a wildcat strike of baggage handlers in Brisbane. Get confused by the calendar? Compare that with arriving in Honolulu (from Manila) a day earlier than planned – a day earlier than friends were expecting us and reservations were made – because we miscalculated the International Date Line. Make an ill-advised purchase? Not as ill as a used car, bought from a friend for $300, that was totaled (without insurance, of course) the very first time I took it for a spin, because the brakes completely failed as I steered slowly up the abutment protecting the toll booth. Mess up a recipe? Probably no worse than the pasta that had to be pitched as completely inedible because the gorgonzola was left out too long . . .
And there's worse – much much worse – that I could tell, but I don't know you all that well. (I'm not sure I know anyone well enough to share everything.) Hurting people, being hurt myself, in ways too excruciating to dwell upon; these are private experiences mostly, but they serve to prop up the soul. I certainly can't guarantee that nothing that nothing that is to come will ever be more devastating: “No worst, there is none,” said Gerard Manly Hopkins. But the vagaries of everyday mishaps and bloopers and little tragedies have largely lost their power to ruin my life. Which is a blessing. At times I even appear philosophical in my old age, which few would have expected earlier. It Is What It Is.
The flip side, of course, is that genuinely transcendent new experiences are also rare, because I've seen, heard, felt so much already, over the years. Been There, Done That, Got The T-Shirt. But the most extreme of these peaks are already decades past, so the passage into my senior years (senescence?) is not all that costly. Long before that, I knew I'd never again marvel at the stirrings of first love, or hear the Bach Magnificat for the first time, or see with virgin eyes Mount Mayon from the air, or taste the original boeuf bourguinon.
But I'm happy enough to be living with someone I love:
Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made.
(On re-reading, Robert Browning actually has his “Rabbi Ben Ezra” contemplating his relationship with God, rather than the boon of a lifetime companion, but I'll borrow these first three lines for my own purposes and leave the rest for the pious among you.)
And we live in our dream house, which is paid for, with enough left over to contemplate the delights on offer in Triangle Restaurant Week, upcoming. Hoping for a taste of something not just delicious (which I'm sure it will be) but, perhaps, never before experienced.
Bon Appetit!
Ooo, an Epic Past Failures thread. I actually am the not a lot ventured, not a lot blowing up in my face type so the constant drumbeat I have is shouda, wouda, couda.
LJ, I thinkk fo rthose of us of a similar approach to life, the Epic Past Failures are not the errors of commission but the errors of omission. Ah, the things that, in retrospect, we should have done — or at least attempted. But didn’t.
Well, the bright side is that, at least in some cases, we can still go try it now. At least, we can . . . if we get a psychology make-over.
I think ou are hitting on the “when I grow old, I shall wear purple” principle.
Compare that with arriving in Honolulu (from Manila) a day earlier than planned – a day earlier than friends were expecting us and reservations were made – because we miscalculated the International Date Line.
An error straight out of Jules Verne! You should feel accomplished.
My life has probably been over-cautiously lived by ordinary human standards, yet I still shudder at the horrible things I’ve done. I find that almost all, though not all, of my biggest regrets were in some way sins of omission caused by fear. Social obligations avoided, promises not followed through, rules followed when they should have been broken.
Some of the stuff I do as I proceed through middle age has been catch-up on things I missed before it gets physically impossible to catch up.
Some of my biggest regrets are over mean things I did as a kid, as far back as 2nd grade. Is that weird?
Thinking about being mean bothers me a lot more than thinking about the mean things other kids did to me – not that those are joyous memories, either.
Why are kids so f*cking mean (sometimes!), anyway?
Not at all weird. One of the things that still makes my stomach clench up was something I did in the fourth grade or so.
We were doing that yearly litany of failure, the Presidential Physical Fitness Test. I was spotting a kid who was doing sit-ups, and the gym teacher had told us that our elbows had to go all the way out and touch the floor at the bottom of the sit-up for it to be valid. My sit-up partner just wouldn’t do it, no matter how many times I harangued him to put his elbows out. And I didn’t count any of his sit-ups, because he wouldn’t follow the elbow rule. Afterward, he asked me how many he did and I said “zero,” and he burst into tears.
“Why are kids so f*cking mean (sometimes!), anyway?”
It was an early CIA black ops training and recruitment program to staff and cast the producers and casts of today’s reality TV shows.
Operation Dagny.
Judge, diss, and eliminate the competition by red tooth and claw.
Matt, I eked out a bronze certificate one year, and I’m pretty sure it was only that one year – I’m thinking 6th or 7th grade.
At any rate, I wish my meanness were on par with yours, not that I would dismiss your feelings about what you did or am trying to out-mean you. It just sort of … is.
I both gave and got a lot worse. I don’t even want to go into detail about how awful I was. It’s too shameful, even though I was all of 7 years old. I’m not the same person I was then, but it was still me.
But, back closer to the original topic at hand, in my mid-forties with four kids, the youngest of whom is only 5 months old, I’m so far off from being able to retire (voluntarily) that I’m more or less resolved to working well into my sixties, at least. You know, so long as I’m able, which I hope I will be. Otherwise, I won’t have much choice in the matter, which could be a problem.
Never mind. That was closer to the topic of dr ngo’s last post. Now I can regret being an idiot at 2:52 PM today.
Age isn’t anything other than a number, and I agree with you that past failures often teach us the most. If only useless of you don’t learn from it.