Most of my friends are older than I am. As a result, I get very little sympathy when I complain about how "old" I'm getting. As my Aunt Catherine would say, "35 is looking better all the time." And I have to admit that my older friends were right, when they said that one's 30s are usually a better decade than one's 20s.
When you're growing up, you always want to look as old as possible. I used to hate it when I was 13 or 14 and my dad would still claim I was under 12, to get a couple of bucks off my admission fee to a movie or a state park. (That's not to say I can't understand his frugality, a trait I've inherited in spades.) Eventually, though, you reach a crossover point -- say, age 27 or so -- where it becomes an insult instead of a compliment when someone overestimates your age.
There are certainly some advantages to having gone around the sun a few times. You no longer have to pad your resume to try to appear more experienced than you really are. Your car insurance rates aren't quite as high as when the company felt that, being young, ipso facto, you must drive like a maniac.
The best part, though, is that you've gotten over most of the impulsiveness and bad judgment that goes along with youth. Meg puts it more bluntly: "When you hit 30, you grow a brain." I guess that means my brain is a five-year-old!
The other thing I've noticed, however, is that the older you get, the faster each year goes by. One of my cousins, when she turned 36, observed that the second 18 years of her life went by much quicker than the first 18. I can't disagree -- it seemed as if it took forever to get to 18 -- to get here, though, happened almost in the blink of an eye.
As a musician, sometimes it's sobering to think that by the time Mozart hit 35, his life's work (and his life itself) was almost done. And Schubert didn't even make it that far, having died at 31. On the other hand, if Bruckner had died at 35, we'd never have heard of him. He would have faded into obscurity, since his greatest works, including all the symphonies, weren't written until much later -- this provides some comfort to those of us who like to think we're late-bloomers.
Actuarially, I guess you could argue that I'm pretty close to the halfway point, as far as life expectancy is concerned. That's a sobering thought, until you realize that it's really not true. That's because the important number, at this point, isn't average life expectancy at birth -- it's average life expectancy for people who've already reached 35. That is to say, take all the data points and then throw out all the ones for people who didn't make it this far. I like to think that gives me a some hope of shooting my age on the golf course, in some far-off year. My short game will have to be much better than it is now, but with 50 years to work on my chipping and putting, who knows?
As I get older, I've begun to realize that there isn't a right way and a wrong way to live. That sounds obvious, but it's not. Most people (myself included) start out all worried that they're not doing the things they're supposed to be doing, accomplishing what they're supposed to be accomplishing, having the career they're supposed to be having, and generally getting the most out of their potential -- usually as measured by someone else. And there's something to be said for making money, living in a nice house with a big toy collection, and that kind of thing, if that's what you're interested in. But there's no law that says you have to keep up with your friends, neighbors, relatives, classmates, or anyone else. If you're happy with what you're doing and where you're going, who's to knock it?
Copyright © 1998 John J. Kafalas