Getting Old

Okay, in one sense, I’m not really getting old.  And in another, I feel I’ve always been old.  or always felt old, or something like that.  And perhaps old isn’t really the right word for it.  Somehow, a seemingly incongruous combination of being arch, crotchety, and phlegmatic all at once sums it up, but doesn’t really do it justice.  Oh and tired.  More than a little tired.  I recall toward the end of college complaining that I felt “tired, in a cosmic way — an unspeakable empty-fuel-tank kind of tiredness, whether I’m having a blast and active or sitting around with a slight buzz, it’s always there”.  Well, that was all a bit dramatic, which I’ll chalk up to youth, but I didn’t feel young.  It’s the darnedest thing.

So here I am at another of these thing that I do from time to time, go off for a couple of weeks in one of my employment capacities, and meet a bunch of folks.  Most are folks I’m seeing for the first time, and some I’ve met before.  A very few are people I actually know to some extent, which means that I knew their names when I saw them.  Not a very high bar.

And this year, in more than one context, I have found that upon meeting new people, I kind of don;t expect to be introduced, or to introduce myself, and frankly have forgotten how to act just a bit upon that meeting.  This is because I do not care to meet now people so much, not at random anyway, and all of this stuff that used to seem crucial now just seems random.  I recall when I was a young smart-aleck imagining that older folks around me might be impressed at the referents, amused at the jokes, surprised at the precocious fellow.  Slightly older, I suppose I strove to be seen as experienced, wordly, wry, or some such thing, and striving also not to seem to strive.  Now I see the younger folks joking about and I don’t even hear their jokes.  The whole style of humor has left me, it seems, and I exactly see myself in their shoes, and I’ve heard that joke before, and if I haven’t, I’ve heard one just like it.  I don’t want to hear their jokes, I don’t want to learn their names, it’s all just a bad television show and I can’t even change the channel.  It’s not that I have any particular disdain for them or their jokes — it just has nothing to do with me.

Well, that’s all a bit dramatic as well, so some things change and others do not.  No doubt I’ll look back on this and chalk it up to the brash style of writing used by those too new to middle-age to know how it goes.  Except that I see the pattern, and I know I’m just watching the wheel turn, doing the thing to do at this stage because at this stage, it’s the thing to do, and the last stage looks stale and the next one is fresh, and once you see the whole pattern the individual threads are no longer interesting.  not at this stage of the cycle.

Next stage: reductionism for dear life.  Because it’s the little things that make up a life.  because seeing the whole pattern, you catch glimpses of the far end, and its a finite number of little things between here and there.  But not yet.  I’m not there yet.  Prime of my life.