I've been kind of indefinite about this age thing. You know I'm older than 65 since baby boomers start around 1945. I'll be 69 in two and a half months. Makes me feel really old to say it that way. I don't feel that old. Yet I know when my resume floats by a thirty-something recruiter even though it doesn't have sharp age markers, she probably puts it into the "no" pile. Not sure I blame her for anything.
When I was a thirty-something I could hardly wait for those fifty and sixty-somethings who seemed to run the world to get out of my way. I wonder if they felt like they ran the world. I sure don't, never have. Now it feels like the thirty-somethings run the world.
That downer Thoreau quote keeps floating through my consciousness--"the great mass of men lead quiet lives of desperation." I get it but it doesn't quite fit. Out of some rude beginnings I think I have had a rich life. Certainly I was blessed to have grown up at a time when things were getting markedly better for someone fortunate enough to be a middle class American. Nothing I could have or did want to do would have been enabled in any significant way by getting a winning ticket in the parent lottery or any other lottery. So the extent to which I feel the desperation Henry David talks about, it is about that general helplessness against the larger world which seems to be in the control of forces much bigger than me. And that can be an experience of any age.
I think part of the problem is that there are few road maps for this state of age. The rest of life is ritualized and time marked so that choice is lessened to some degree. I think I used to smoke to mark time as much as anything. Now it feels as if I have to create it all. The closest thing to a demand on my schedule is the class I have to teach two days a week and that will be over in a couple of weeks. It's not that I don't have things to do. My schedule isn't nine to five, but there is something almost every day and there's still the dog to walk.
Enough! This is beginning to float all over the place.
sounds like this is about finding or getting comfortable with the context for this time in life.
ReplyDeleteThe baby boom wave has set us (the cohort) up to be different. But different was never defined. Clearly, youth obsessed, and that is kind of crazy.
Wonder if previous generations slipped comfortably into this stage of life. We assume they did. Maybe part of our boomer obsession with being different.
N
I'm doing it not so much to get comfortable as to get underneath the stuff that is just reactions to my circumstances.
ReplyDeleteYou're right about the "you're different" messages. Got 'em all the time. I mean after all they lived through the Depression and WW II.
But I wonder of previous generations had enough time in this "stage of life" to be concerned about it.
tnqog