On Being your Age

One thing I’ve notice about growing older is that I think a lot about growing older. It’s a very interesting and ever-evolving transition, offering many opportunities for reflection, and one that most of us will have the chance to experience.

A few years ago I heard the novelist Francine Prose interviewed on the radio and this issue came up. She said that when she was young, she operated with the world view that everyone had a particular age, and they had always been that age and would always stay that age. For some reason, old people had decided they wanted to be old; she didn’t understand why, but hey, it was their choice.

This observation doesn’t stand up for a moment if you think about, but there’s some truth to it. In any given moment, we are surrounded by people of a certain age, and the age they are has a lot to do with how we relate to them. For instance, some people are potential romantic partners while others are excluded, all because of their age (the movie Back to the Future has some Oedipal fun with this).

Here’s another example: when I think of my parents, I almost think of them as they were in their last years of their lives. If I want to think of them when they were younger, the most natural way is to think back to a situation in which I was much younger and they were much younger too. In other words, the age-relationship is frozen.

The same thing holds for the people I interact with each day. My temporal relationship with them is frozen in time. That’s one reason why old friends matter to us so much: we share a common time or timing that has evolved over the years–we are moving through time together. With people we haven’t known that long, this can be a bit confusing. When I meet someone, we see each other in the context of our mutual ages, and this is fixed and immutable (that’s the point that Prose is making. But that age-frame may not apply internally (most people I know have a younger internal age-view of themselves). That has the potential to cause confusion and misunderstandings.

Our culture values youth, and so as people get older, they tend to try to hold on to their younger selves, and try to present themselves accordingly. Sometimes it even works. But the age we are right now is part of the reality we inhabit, and it frames our interaction with everyone else we meet. If we allow for that reality, we may see the world more clearly and have more to offer others. This has nothing to do with taking on an ‘older persona’, but it has everything to do with being who we are.