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Bye Bye Youth Posting Date: Dec 30 2007 1:50AM It’s official – I have lost my youth. It has disappeared like a Nicole Kidman movie from the multiplex, not to be reclaimed again until the giddy early days of my eventual retirement when I start taking a 2 pm nap every day and watching cartoons at lunch just because I can.
I know I am aging because I have begun to regard young people as if they are citizens of a different country. Like a Canadian watching American exploits on CNN, I observe their behaviour, pass judgment on them for their actions and attitudes, and take comfort in knowing that whatever brush paints them paints me not. It’s comforting. It’s unsettling. It means I’m old.
I recognize now the progress of age. I am acquainted with the changing capacity for anger – the mellowing of the grumpy; the crotchetification of the happy. I live with the mobility of hair from the handsome parts of my anatomy to the unhandsome. I have learned to wake up earlier, arrive for appointments earlier, eat dinner earlier and go to bed earlier. I have found myself, as if by accident, listening to CBC Radio, watching public television (not just when Fawlty Towers is on) and getting unnaturally excited about visits to the local garden centre.
As this process has taken hold, I have come to envy the young, a sure sign that I no longer belong among their ranks. I envy their potential, their skin, the firmness of their bellies, the unburdened levity of their shoulders, and the altitude of their asses. I am now jealous of their symbiotic relationships with iPods, brand names, unlistenable music and unfunny comedians. I recall with longing their season’s pass to the amusement park of sex, their unshakable belief in the correlation of loud noise and fun, and their lack of disappointment in themselves, an attitude that comes from believing that a paucity of accomplishment is no reason to feel unaccomplished. I pine for their infinite capacity for boredom, for their disconnection from the future, and for their ability to be both consumed by and oblivious to shame.
Mostly though, I envy the belief that underwear is a fashion item, that a well-fitted baseball cap has magic powers and that somehow it makes sense that you can’t pay the phone bill but you can always find the cash for a second cheeseburger.
Since you cannot envy that which you are, I now know definitively that I am no longer young. I must, therefore, take solace in being experienced and hopefully wise. Of course, experience is as dangerous in its own way as youth. Youth may be wasted on the young, but experience is often wasted on the jaded. The function of experience, it seems to me, should be something other than the cauterization it so often is.
The process of living should be like a never-ending trip to the opthamologist … a slow and steady series of lenses flipped before your eyes, with someone asking, “Which is better … this one … or this one?” At some point in the parade of ever-more-refined options, you should find that your vision is clear, precise and well-aimed.
That 20/20 vision is the ultimate goal of experience. The power of clear sight should become the telescope and the microscrope that you use to view your society, your culture, the media, your colleagues, your friends, your profession, your family and, most importantly, yourself.
Youth, as much as it is defined by the intoxication of potential without proven limits and buttocks without sag, is also about a significantly blurred, scattered and selfish way of seeing. This may, in fact, be what defines youth as an attitude, not a chronological age. I know plenty of young people with sharp self-sight and plenty of older folks who couldn’t see themselves clearly with the Hubble Telescope and a GPS unit.
I’m pretty sure I like where I am – still toned enough to pretend that my buttocks look seventeen, but experienced enough to know that ass altitude doesn’t amount to much in the big scheme of things.
The next stop for me is my mid-life crisis. Anyone looking to sell a yellow Hummer? |
