Getting older is a mixed bag.
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One thing that happens as you get older is that you begin to get some perspective on life. I remember some time in my twenties noticing that I had began to layer events. What I mean is that I began to compare things that were happening now to similar things in the past. Over time I attributed my new more complicated view of life as a sign of maturity. My life was no longer just a continuum. At strategic points I seemed to move my observation point so that the world looked different. Now when I looked back at my college days it wasn’t so much my life experience as it was a clinical observation of different people. I wasn’t feeling the emotions like when I was living them. I was detached and often critical in ways that I could never have managed in real time.
These perspective shifts kept happening and these days, I can hardly relate to the old me or what I may have been thinking back then. I have constructed a facade that I can accept which manages to hold those layers together. My hope is that somehow all these fractured layers make a whole and recognizable human being and not something out of Picasso’s cubist nightmares.
So what does it all mean?
I’m not sure if there is any benefit from trying to analyze the reality of my memories. Someone commented recently about having the mind of a 17 year old and since the guy is in his 60’s I was trying to fit myself into his shoes, so to speak. Could I even fathom these days what the mind of a 17 year old is like- even my 17 year old mind? And if I could, how would my much older body cope? What I concluded is that I don’t have the ability to know what my 17 year old mind was like after all the filters and changes of perspective in the years since.
I know what the writer was thinking. It was the almost constant state of arousal distracting a 17 year old male from the world around him. There is a disconnect with that thinking. There was nothing mental about those distractions. They weren’t a product of the 17 year old mind but of the 17 year old body. Mental struggle back then was to control those raging hormones and behave in a socially approved manner.
The good old days.
The writer was remembering those years and longing for the feelings. But he has it all distorted. Back then his 17 year old mind was fighting his 17 year old body to be socially acceptable. Today that 17 year old mind would have nothing to fear from a 60 year old body.
In my dreams it might seem good to get back a seventeen year old body or even a seventeen year old brain but I’m not so sure that I’d be willing to give up all those layers of experience and seasoning. If I had the chance to go back to an earlier age, there would certainly be a qualifying but before I’d take the step.
Would you have a but? Or would you go back to being seventeen in an instant?
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