When I turned 20, I was one of the youngest of my group of friends. I had watched them all make a big deal out of it, and I laughed. 20 was no problem.
When i turned 30, I was one of the youngest of my group of friends., although I had made a number of friends who were substantially younger. Between 20 and 30 I had graduated from university, worked full time for seven years (at three different companies), gotten married, bought my first house (and my second one), and had gone through four cars. And gone bald. With all of that stuff behind me, the fact that 29 turned to 30 didn’t seem like any big deal. 30 was no problem.
For some reason, I’m spending a lot of time thinking about 35 coming up early next month though. Maybe it’s the “as close to 50 as 20” thing. Or maybe it’s just the thing that Jonathan Carroll pegs exactly in his blog post today:
We lose it– it disappears, evaporates. The edge, the courage, the black madness and abandon of the young. The dazzle of living one hundred percent in the moment. It goes away, leaks out of us like water through cracks. Cracks that come from growing older. They start when you buy whole life insurance policies and mortgages, or hear the results of a not-so-good physical check-up. They start when there’s a need rather than a desire for warm baths. Safety over spontaneity, comfort over commotion. Part of him hated it. Not the growing older, but becoming tame, upstanding, predictable, half-hearted, skeptical about too much.
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