Getting old(er)

And visiting lives we no will longer lead.

River and swans in Stratford

I turned 26 last month. Twenty six.

Some of you may be thinking god that’s young, others, (if you’re anything like my 16 year old self) god that’s old But for me birthdays have always brought this sense of fear, this sense of impending doom.

In todays culture, with todays life expectancy, it’s not really very old. I’m a third of my way through my life at worse, a quarter at best. However, I’ve always had this fear of aging. The feeling of life marching away without me, having to scamper to catch with up with it.

I think part of the fear comes from the constant worry that I haven’t achieved The Right Things at The Right Time. And this is coming from a person who has achieved many of the traditional Right Things at the traditional Right Time. I’m in a stable relationship, I have a career, a mortgage, and I’m on track to pop out some babies in the next 3 to 5 years, too. (Though that last one is a liiiiittttllleeee bit scary.)

It’s not that i’m scared of death, or being old, or looking old. I am really quite eager to get older. I’m excited to be 30, flirty, and and thriving, and I’ve heard turning 40 is incredibly freeing. In fact, I enjoy fantasising what it’ll be like to be a 70 year old girl, doing her thing. Reading her books. Drinking her coffee. It all sounds pretty great.

So, if the concept of aging isn’t what I’m scared of, where’s the fear?

There’s the obvious fear of suddenly realising I might not be able to do all the things I wanted to do, I planned to do. I feel like I’m getting to the point in my life where all the things I’ve dreamt about suddenly either have to happen, like, now, or I have to give them up.

I know this way of thinking isn’t totally true. I could live abroad at 50, learn ballet at 60, become the foremost expert in cat behaviour at 70. However, these are unquestionably different from, for example, attending a really academic university at 18, being a 20-something journalist in New York city, eat-pray-loving around the world before you adoringly endure 3 children and 18 years of school runs. (Can you tell I’ve been really into my early 2000s TV recently?)

However, despite these persistent dreams, I don’t think I actually want them. I have taken many active steps in my life that prove these aren’t exactly my top priorities right now. If I really wanted to move to New York I probably wouldn’t have adopted kittens. If I really wanted to explore the world I’d probably wouldn’t be so reluctant to ever book a holiday abroad.

(Side note: I find these big dreams of being far away or running away so interesting. Moving to the Big City or halfway around the world always has been held up as such a ~glamorous~ thing to do. We love the concept of The Escape. And with my own dreams, I notice they’re quite individualistic. Sure, if I was a single gal with no friends, moving far away sounds pretty cool, but as I’ve painstakingly attempted to build relationships and expand the (tiny but growing!) community around me, leaving feels so much less appealing.)

So, digging deeper, I think the actual fear comes more from losing the possibilities that these big dreams bring. It’s the feeling that this path of life is suddenly being closed off forever, the steel door has come down and locked itself, shutting that version of me off forever.

And you know what the thickest, strongest, tightest locked door is? What we always come back to, The End Of The World!

Because, for however long I manage to keep my anxieties in check, despite managing to stay pretty cool, calm, collected, and able to feel positively about the world presented to me, the unstoppable march of life brings it right back into focus.

Thankfully, I don’t feel it as fully as I used to. I no longer believe that if I learnt just the right skills or planned my life in just the right way that I’d be able to make my life apocalypse-proof. Nor do I even actually believe the world is Ending in the way I used to.

I don’t believe there will be a big apocalyptic event. Things are going to get worse, then a bit better, then a lot worse, then a lot better, and so on and so on and so on. We’re probably going to all get used to The Way Things Are and will be both jealous and appalled at The Way Things Used To Be, and my grandchildren will probably tell me how cool it is that I got to grow up in the early 2000s without smog and brain-computer interface chips.

And whether we’re in for the brain-computer interface chip future or not, I believe one of the most important things we can be doing for ourselves right now, young or old, is to do The Work.

The unpicking, the therapising, the community building. I see it the same way I see cleaning for your future self, if you do the dishes the night before, you wake up with a clean kitchen. The more unpicking of out-dated societal teachings I do now, the less I have to do next year. If I do The Work now, I’ll be able to wake up in a few years with less of a heavy soul. And much more likely to enjoy 70 year-old girlhood.

And I think this ties in with the idea of getting to an age where you feel like you have to do the things you’ve dreamt about or give up on them, because theres a certain joy in reassessing what your fully formed frontal cortex-ed adult brain wants, rather than what 16 year old you thought would be cool.

At this point I must remind myself of Oliver Burkeman’s book Four Thousand Weeks, how an average lifespan has about 4,000 weeks in it. And its pretty impossible to try to do everything, so we must decide what we will do in our finitude. However I think though this may be short, it also gives us an opportunity to bring in snippets of the life we thought we might have.

With my 2,648 weeks left, perhaps I can enjoy the the alternative world where I could’ve been a hairdresser or a nail tech, by my friends nails (likely) and do my friends hair (unlikely). I could pick up various books and classes that interest me, developing my expertise in cat behaviour early. Perhaps I could visit various aspects of the lives I wanted to live, say hello, write about them, dream about them, and embody them for a few days, or even just an hour.

I’d like to leave you with a concept I heard recently soothed a lot of my fears in just a few words. How when you turn 35, if you live to the average of 70, you still have another entire life ahead of you. This time without all that time wasted as a child without much autonomy. The wave of joy I feel when I imagine getting to live my entire life again, but this time around the way I want to, was incredible. And it applies to so many ages. So much life can happen between 20 and 30, 50 to 60, 80 to 90.

We never fill up our quota on living. It’s always our choice to decide where we might put our mind to next.

Image from waitbutwhy

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