Most of the people I interact with in life and on social media are younger than I am, maybe 30ish to mid 50s, sometimes older but that is rare. I get teased, or sometimes aggressively chastised, for my comments about being old. Generally speaking I am joking because 63 is the new 61, right? Even that is a joke. I get that I have a young mind and fit appearance (I'd go toe to toe with an "average" 30 year old on pull ups: yesterday I did 21 full extension pull ups in one set, 51 in three sets. Try that at any age) and a looong way in life to go still. This means I probably have some room and some basis on which to play the old man game as a big fat tease because I know I've still got the goods.
On the other hand, at 63, I am clearly in a different boat or mindset than a 30 or even a 50 year old. I have been through different experiences and, for the most part, more of them. I am also of the opinion that one needs to be sensitive to the formalized-in-the-past "stages" of life and respect them rather than deny them (think: botox, plastic surgery, comb-overs, 20yo girlfriends, heh). I did a more formal cover here. That makes this post a little redundant but when one is working through an idea one needs to touch on it more than once to get one's arms around it.
The nub of it for me, for now, is that the others, the 30-50 year olds, are still "building" while I am not or perhaps I am just doing it in different ways:
- My career is past (hence the retirement blog) so I am not building a career. My economics are made up of consumption and conservation now.
- I am not building a family and my kids are aging out and there is zero risk of new ones (heh).
- I am, I hope, in the last relationship I'll have. There is no marriage or new person coming over the horizon but then again you never know. Anyway, that's not in the plan. Solitude is not a problem if that comes. Rather, it will be embraced as it already has been.
- While I lift, it is doubtful I could get much bigger now nor do I really want bulk for the sake of bulk. Function, maybe aesthetics and health are the dimensions of interest.
I was thinking about this non-building thing the other day because I realized that while I no longer build too much prospectively I am also not entirely done with the construction of the past either. I mean, I did burn some 40 year old love letters this year and tossed quite a few pounds of dead weight from my household. But what I noticed was that I have been using miscellaneous content (from formal world literature to Twitter to men's dating blogs to movies etc) to try to understand who I was and what I remember. I was using this method as a way to interpret, contextualize, reframe and reconstruct memory. The goal here, though, might be framed as: "how do I live well and purposefully, maybe even optimally*, going into act three of a four act life?"
To flesh this out, here is one example among several. Why the hell would I, given the bullet points above, spend any time whatsoever watching men's relationship YouTube videos. Seems like a total waste of time. Sort of is but we also have to consider: a) I was a moron at age 25 and maybe all the way up to 58, b) I made some pretty big mistakes along the way...in ignorance but good faith of course, c) men did not have the internet in 1983 and were unable to share our common insights on how relationship behaviors work -- insights which are now crystal clear on dating market and inter-sex behaviors, whether in or out of marriage. So, suddenly I am now able to retrospectively understand the evolutionarily-tinted behaviors of women in general, several memorable women in particular, and myself (very very particularly) in a way that was impossible 40 years ago. It's like "ooooh, so that's what was going on..." Decades of memory now make sense rather than lie there like a 40-year fog of error. This is useful both as self-interpretation and as a foundation for a forward-looking purposeful life. "Foundation" because I can now burn the non-essential de-fogged past like I did the love letters: fresh ground ahead and a lighter load to carry.
In college I read liberal arts religion. In that context I spent a lot of time with St. Augustine. It wasn't until maybe 20 years ago that Garry Wills, who did a modern translation and exegesis, helped me see some of his work better than I could have at 19. Certainly Augustine is well known for Book X of his Testimony (Confessions) and the treatment of memory. This was a seminal piece of work in both the canon and my personal experience. Wills interprets it -- usefully for me -- like this:
Memory [is] a laboratory in which we are continually refashioning everything we remember – which is everything we know. We remake ourselves in that crucible.
To live in memory, then, is not to “live in the past,” but to come near the Beginning, the origo, in which God created all things and found them good.
Now, that's a platform on which I can build.
* this is a quant blog. The rules state that the word "optimal" must be used once in each post. ;-)
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