When I Was Younger: Excerpts from Middling

I put out an occasional newsletter about music, books, work, and getting older. You can subscribe to it in the sidebar. My next issue is coming out next week and I'd love for you to get it. Here's a taste of what happens there: This is from last summer's issue, in which I reflect on the experience of turning fifty.

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I used to bob or bang my head in unison with The Who (“Hope I die before I get old!”) and later R.E.M. (“I can’t see myself at thirty!”). Somewhere along the way I started to stare my future in the face to a soundtrack of Neil (ironically) Young: “Old man, take a look at my life; I’m a lot like you.” The words of Steely Dan (“Are you reeling in the years? Stowing away the time?”) sent me into moments of circumspection teetering on the edge of existential crisis. I began to bob and bang my head to the (ironically) Old 97s (“I used to be the new kid!”) and to Ben (putting the old in) Folds: “Once you wanted revolution; now you’re the institution” and “He’s forgotten but not yet gone.”

Now the day has come. I am what I am, and what I am is old. If I happen to forget now and then (something that happens to those of us of advanced age), there’s always some snarky millennial nearby ready to shock me back into awareness.

People who are older still than I am occasionally pat me on the head when I fret about the aging process, which is comforting in a way. I have ample role models for aging well. But it’s the number—the roundness of it, the ffffiness of it—that stresses me out. I’m closer to a century of life than I am to my birth—a fact that naively presupposes that I’ll make it to a hundred without my heart stopping or my bank account running out of money. Fifty is a slap in the face, a rude awakening to the reality that we are all of us living on borrowed time.

Shortly before John Lennon turned twenty-five he wrote the immortal words “When I was younger, so much younger than today, I never needed anybody’s help in any way. But now those days are gone; I’m not so self-assured.” Isn’t that cute? That was less than a year before he called the Beatles more popular than Jesus. It was, in any case, an insightful line: The young are blessed with audacity, a sense of permanence and invulnerability. Only time can whittle away at it.

Fifteen years later John wrote a song called “Borrowed Time,” drafted shortly before he turned forty and recorded a few months before he was shot and killed. By this time “When I was younger” has given way to “Now I am older”; the desperation that fueled “Help” has given way to an optimism born of humility and hope:

The more that I see the less that I know for sure... The future is brighter and now is the hour.

Humility and hope are not bad gifts to carry with me into my fifties, I suppose. I observe them in my own elders, the people I look to as guides for this new season. I look for them in myself as well, and on good days I find them there. On bad days I try to remind myself that they’re only hidden, not lost, and i can still recover them if I put in the effort.