This is what getting older is like
Getting older is like taking a trip across the country in a car.
From one perspective – from the inside – nothing moves. The cupholder is stationary. The coffee stain on the bottom of the beige seat is eternal. You might sit in a moving car for eight hours and feel still. It’s only when you look out the window and see the world rushing around you that you know you’ve left your first place very far behind.
Getting older is like admitting to yourself that you won’t be a professional baseball player. You’d harbored the hope since you wrapped rubber bands around your first glove to break in the leather. But now you’re 14, and after a game in which you make an error and strike out twice, you fight away the tears and reconcile yourself to reality. You let go. This is probably a good thing – it’s certainly inevitable – but you’d hoped to hold on for a little bit longer.
Getting older is like visiting your old elementary school just after you’ve turned 25. The hallways are much narrower than you remember, although you know it’s not the hallways that have changed. But they did repaint some of the walls, and when you ask, they don’t remember the name of your third-grade teacher.
Getting older is like walking outside at sunset after spending the long hours of the day locked into the white screen of a computer. The colors stop your breath. You’re struck by the freshness and the bigness of the world. There’s a sense that everything on which you’d poured your focus has turned out to be small and dim. But it wasn’t really about you, anyway.
Getting older is like going to a concert and hearing a song for the first time. Everyone else seems to know it. After a verse or two, you begin to pick out the pattern to the melody, almost well enough to sing along. So you start to sing with the crowd, and then you realize that this time through the chorus, the words are different.
Updates
Hey, I turned 30 the other week and I’m still wrapping my mind around it. I’ll try to keep future posts from being this melodramatic, but no promises now that I’m old.
Music stuff: I was ambitious to think I’d finish a song in the midst of the holiday season. No new music this month, but I hope to have something out soon after the calendar turns over.
Thanks, as always, for reading.
-Jon