What if We Get Old?

Do you dream often? I think about dreams all the time. I always want to know what this life means and one of the ways that I find meaning in it is by searching for some kind of connection between the world and those dreams that I find deep inside myself. Something I've noticed about people is that we tend to fear growing old, and I think it's because we worry that we won't be able to do those things we've secretly dreamed about. As a child and a teenager, I noticed the slight reverence older people held in their voice for "young people." I'd hear them say "...the good thing is you're still young." or "Well, you're still young..." and I always wondered about that. Now, as my 30th birthday becomes a date within the next few years, I suddenly get it a bit more.

Just like those people, suddenly I look at 18 year olds and I think of myself at that age, with a slight envy because you can do anything then - you can be anything. Then, I realise that the world we live in now, more than ever, allows us to be "18" forever. Because of most social structures, we tend to forget that there are more opportunities now than ever before. Because there is a well defined and understood pattern to development, most people assume that they have to follow it. We all go to school, most people now get degrees, you get a job, have a family, you work and become soccer moms or coach dads and then you become empty nesters and have mid-life crises because your life's meaning surrounded your children and you've realised you don't have a relationship with yourself or your partner without them and you don't know what to do, you reconcile it somehow, you retire, then you think about everything you wished you did "when you were young." Of course, that's just one clichéd existence, and there are many alternatives, but my point is that we all tend to see a trajectory similar to this one, and when we've reached any one of these stages, we assume that we've missed the boat on stages prior.

What if life is no longer linear, and never really was?

I'll start with myself here: one of the very fundamental fears that made me dread moving back to Trinidad from Texas was the idea that I would get sucked into a routine, that I would join a tread mill life and get stuck on it until I was old, and that I'd wake up forty years from now thinking that my life looks just like everyone else's. It took more than a year for me to begin to grasp that I have control over that "looking like everyone else" thing. The liberation for me is in the idea that my dreams are NO ONE else's exactly, and what I do well, and who I am is not the same as anyone else. If I aim to survive life, then I am more likely to look like everyone else, because all I'll be doing is "trying to get by," I'll be just "doing what I need to do" to make a living and "make it." But, if I realise that I am the dream then I also must realise that I am the thing that makes the routine change.

Getting old to me is not inevitable. Getting grey and aging is, but becoming "too old to..." is really up to me. Yes, for women there is a biological limit to her childbearing years, and there are physical limits for both men and women, but consider every other end to the statement "too old to..."  and see what you come up with. Last year, I wrote the post A New Thing, where I talked about the fatigue we all experience when everything is the same, and cripplingly predictable. Here's an excerpt:

The challenge then, is to make sure that you implement a new thing in your life, as often as you can. My dad likes to say that if you weren't alive, the world wouldn't exist. I like this, because it puts a really interesting perspective on your life. Everything you see and experience is coloured by you. You are heavily imprinted on all your impressions of the world.

So, this year I'm adding to this challenge by calling you (your heart, your dreams) the NEW thing. You can either become old - i.e. stop dreaming, and fall helplessly into the gap, OR you can search forever more for the things that surprise and excite you on a daily basis.

I choose new.