Thursday, December 19, 2024

On aging and wisdom

Personal note from Frank Bruni's newsletter today:

I was told I’d be wiser. I heard that all the time. When I grew older, I’d more accurately judge people and more quickly size up situations. That’s what adults in their 40s said when I was in my teens and what retirees said when I was midcareer. And they were mostly right.

I was told I’d know myself better, and indeed I do, but that seems to me an unimpressive function of simple arithmetic: I’ve had more years with the person in question and collected more evidence of his triggers and tics. He was a haiku to me at 13, a short story at 24, a novella at 35. He’s “Middlemarch” now. I guess he’ll be an encyclopedia in the end. I hope it’s the kind with illustrations and artful fonts.

I turned 60 this year — on Halloween, to be exact. That was hardly the main thing about my 2024 but it was a thing, milestone-wise. Days later I went to the movies at a multiplex where, I discovered, I qualified for the senior-citizen discount. I’ll consider that a silver lining to go with my increasingly silver hair.

But while I’ve matured in many ways, I feel less different than I thought I would, and I don’t mean physically. (On that front, the passage of time is palpable.) I mean emotionally.

Whatever wisdom and self-knowledge I’ve gained pale beside the lingering gremlins in my head and stubborn butterflies in my gut. I’m still needled by so many doubts, roiled by so many fears. At some point, I thought, I’d get a break.

There are moments when I’m 60 going on 16, and none of my elders ever told me about that. They never explained that a certain inextinguishable tremulousness isn’t an affliction of youth but an affliction of being alive, and that “forever young” is at once an aspiration and a curse. If turning 60 taught me anything, it’s that the magnitude of clarity and degree of confidence that I’ve long craved aren’t the rewards of aging, waiting for me if I just hung on. They’re pretty myths.

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