age

Over the summer I turned forty.  I genuinely don't feel forty.  I think that's going to be a theme every time I turn a new age.  Where'd my twenties go?  I can't be out of my thirties already!  I'm sure that fifty is the new twenty-five!

I've had a lot of observations about getting older, but three have been on my mind lately.

First, I've been weirded out by the number of times I've seen someone my age or younger who my mind has registered as old.  Just in the past day I saw someone wearing a shirt declaring "Established in 1979," who I did not think looked my age, even though he was clearly born in the same year.  This is very much vanity from someone who likes to think he isn't vain.  "I can't possibly look that age, right?!"

Second, while I see more overall growth in my life, it feels slower.  I mean this in the sense that old dogs can learn new tricks, and can possibly learn them better, but it takes longer than when the dog was younger.  When I look at the things I've learned and improved on in the last five years it's a numerically shorter list than from the five year period from when I turned fifteen to when I turned twenty.  I feel like a have a better grasp on that shorter list and that it includes a lot more soft skills, though.

I don't know if this is something anyone else experiences, but I'm not intimidated to learn a lot of things that used to intimidate me.  However, there is a real limit that I see to how quickly I can progress on a given skill-set or cache of knowledge.

Third, I have also noticed that in some respects age is a minor super power in the same way that working the same job for years on end is.  Some people are naturally wise and see how certain bad choices will go badly.  Some people are just old enough to have seen this rodeo before and know from experience that certain bad choices will go badly.  It's odd to see someone do or say something that I might have thought was a good idea years ago, but to immediately know what a mistake it was.  Some of that is just that it's easy to see things as a super power when you used to be thoroughly clueless.  I'd like to think that age does bring a level of maturity as well, though.

Here's to another decade which will undoubtedly conclude with my flabbergasted exclamation of, "Where did my forties go!"