Click the pic for 10 things you may not
know about this iconic painting.
A guitar-slinging friend of mine, Tj Jones, posted a humorous thread on the blue scourge of the internet (Facebook) about discovering he was on the cusp of being considered “elderly”:
Just saw a headline about the tragic killing of an elderly black. And yeah, that’s pretty tragic, and not to be taken lightly. However, I felt even more personal tragedy when I saw the ‘elderly’ black man was 66. So I’ve only got a couple of years before I’m declared *elderly*!?!? Damn, guess I better get to sowing my wild oats, pronto!
Several mutual friends quickly chimed in, of course, offering encouragement, and I started to do the same. But, as often happens, I got a bit windy on my response and decided to blog it instead. Here goes:
To me, age is just a number, and the following notwithstanding, I tend to deemphasize my birthdays. I prefer not to make much of a public display of them. Mostly, I think, because I’m not a big fan of cake.
Now, about those numbers — sometimes higher numbers are a negative, such as the crime rate or the rate of inflation. In terms of personal or governmental debt, higher numbers are a buzzkill. In audio production, a higher latency number (a noticeable delay between a live performance and actually hearing that performance in the speakers) will stop a session dead in its tracks.
But higher numbers often indicate greater and more desirable value: certainly when it comes to wealth, it is reasonable to desire and work toward higher numbers; a family may well desire to increase their number for various reasons that make sense to them; when wind chill is a concern, a higher temperature is a welcome relief.
In terms many on this thread [musicians] will get, songwriters are never satisfied with writing one good song. No, they keep writing to add ever more gems to their repertoire. A guitar player, bassist, drummer, whatever, will gain satisfaction by adding another lick, a fresh beat, some cool chord or progression that takes them to a higher level of musicianship.
In many ways, we like and prefer higher numbers.
But when it comes to adding years to our lives
(at least past, oh, 30 or so), not so much.
I recall it being a bit sobering when I turned 40 to realize that, by any reasonable estimation given then-current life expectancies, I was somewhere around the mid-point in my life on this planet… and that only by assuming I’d continue my lucky streak and avoid what I call “the bus factor’. When I calculated how many days I had lived in my 40 years, realizing that my entire life amounted to less than 15,000 days, it struck me as a fairly insignificant number, considering all that had happened in my life up to that point.
I consider adding years to “our age” as a positive thing. Obviously, getting older beats the hell out of the alternative. But it could be argued that that is so only if there is an accompanying wisdom to the years, which unfortunately not every aging person acquires. The curious, the open-minded, the faithful, the ones who think for themselves, the creative — such folks generally do get wiser with age, and in certain cultures, the elderly are revered for what they have experienced and learned from that experience.
While somewhat muted in America today compared to past eras, I think there lingers (at least among the sharper tools in the shed) a strong impulse toward appreciating the elderly and taking the lessons of their lives to heart, as best we may. That’s a good thing and suggests a certain wisdom even among the very young who practice it. It’s certainly smarter to learn from the mistakes and successes of others so that we might avoid at some of life’s inevitable pitfalls, and strive to walk the narrower path to personal success, however that may be defined by each individual.
So I say, embrace your age as well as your experiences (even if you don’t like cake), embrace the wisdom of your elders (in that regard, the older the better), then glean from every unavoidable mistake and unfortunate turn of events what you can, and relish in the wisdom which every year bestows upon you.
The saying, “You aren’t getting older, you’re getting better”, is often dismissed as trite, and I suppose it is. But sayings become trite, more often than not, because they are true.
