Over the past half a decade or so, I’ve gradually moved into my new home over in the land of Middle-Age. It’s a wonderful Tolkienesque place where you now need to get up to go to the toilet in the middle of the night and your shoulder is still twinging even though it’s been nearly a week since you lifted that suitcase.
I don’t mind. There’s a trade-off, or at least there is if you’re doing it properly. Way back when, I wrote a blog post about this very topic – it was titled Growing Old – and what I wrote then still stands. As my body begins to show wear and tear, my spirit just gets more and more alive as experience works its magic. Well, ‘alive’ sounds a bit strong, but it certainly seems to be going in the opposite direction to the rest of me. Rarely do I find myself thinking wistfully about the days of my youth.
Actually, if I do ever catch myself thinking ‘I wish I was young again’ it’s usually only because there are mistakes that I would have quite liked Young James to avoid. I don’t ever want to be young again because I miss being able to eat kebabs without putting on weight, or because it’s nice to not do some sport and then spend the next day limping around the house, but rather because I see the benefit of the wisdom that I have now and want to share it with Young James. I don’t look back because I want to celebrate my youth, but rather because I want to celebrate experience.
I feel quite blessed at this stage of my life, as I look around at others and realise that I got my mid-life crisis out of the way when I was young. All those questions about what I was doing with my life and what was the point of it and what do I have to show for it all and so on and so on – well, I was already being strangled by those when I was twenty-something. It would be dishonest of me to pretend that I never have those thoughts now – I think anyone who wants to make their life count will probably be asking those kind of questions as long as they’re alive – but the difference is that I’m content enough with the answers that I do have to just get on with it.
It’s good to glance over your shoulder every now and then, but it can be dangerous to not look where you’re going.
Yes, James, I agree. Experience has eyes in the back of its head—and, like a deaf and blind old dog on a dark night (or a wise old prophet), she isn’t addled by all the colour and noise of ‘vanity fair’ but cuts to the chase (or the jugular you might say) and goes mostly on sense of smell.
In this next thought, I am certainly not suggesting any thing about you here, but your blog has got me thinking… There is also that other ‘problem’ for some of us. The problem of having virtue and niceness arrive in you much more early than that of your peers. In this case—with a kind of sigh, and the derision of your school friends—you have to face the fact that life (family/society/God?) is going to expect much more of you; and perhaps be more dangerous.
CS Lewis talks about it a bit… ‘If you are a nice person, if virtue comes easily to you, beware, much is expected of those to whom much is given… If you mistake for your own merits what are really God’s gifts to you through nature, if you are content with simply being nice, then you are still a rebel, and all those gifts will only make your fall more terrible, your corruption more complicated, your bad example more disastrous…etc’ Following the point to the bitter end he reminds us that the devil was once an archangel.
Amen!