Growing Older - by Cathy

Growing older:

I’m actually kind of ambivalent about getting older.  It’s not like it happened all of a sudden– it pretty much started right about the time Mom and Dad decided to dance the dance of luuuuv and that little swimmer poked through that tiny egg.  It is what it is.  It’s like asking how I feel about having fingers.  I don’t really feel ANYTHING about it.  I don’t mean to say that I take it for granted – I certainly don’t.  But, I guess I prefer to think about each moment as a singular miraculous thing, rather than focusing on big things like THE PASSAGE OF TIME AND ITS EFFECT ON THE HUMAN PSYCHE.  It’s too big.  Maybe that’s why I’ve put off writing this piece…I just don’t have anything to say.

I’m looking across the hall at the decorations in Laura’s office – she is celebrating her 29^th birthday.  She told me this morning that she was having a hard time, because it’s the last of her 20’s.  I told her to “Buck up little camper!”  I mean, if you get right down to it, you spend half of your 20’s without a fully developed brain – so, she should be happy – she gets to spend the next decade finally being a fully developed human. 

I say this as I sit at the twilight of my 30’s – certainly not old – but not young either…or, maybe all that is in the eye of the beholder.  My Grandma is almost 104.  I wonder what she has to say about getting older… 

If I have to say SOMEthing about THE PASSAGE OF TIME AND ITS EFFECT ON THE HUMAN PSYCHE, what I can give is this: I don’t think I’m nearly as interesting as I was back when I thought that everything I was thinking and feeling was unique.  But, I am safer and healthier.

Maybe that’s what getting old is: figuring out how to survive, and to be ok with surviving.   I’m not trying to start any revolutions today, but I do eat better, drink less, and I run now.  Maybe I should share, as a prologue to this piece, an essay I wrote back in 1994 – when I was 22.  Maybe the juxtaposition of that with this is all that needs to be said about growing older…it’s the Calm after the Storm.

~CH