natural sounds

Lately, people have really been interested in discussing the “issues of their mid-30s,” which is exactly how I’ve been putting it.

Maybe it’s because I’m having a baby soon. Maybe it’s bringing up all these issues for other people. Or, maybe it’s because I’m the oldest of most of my friends and so they’re just now starting to think about things that have been on my mind for years.

A part of me also wonders if it’s not somehow developmental. You know, your childhood is a time of profound narcissism. Teenage years are “emerging from the chrysalis.” In your twenties, you set out to conquer the world. So your thirties … hmmm. The thirties seem to be about finding peace with the fact that everyone else exists on this planet just about the same as you do.

Which ask a pretty profound question, if you think about. And it’s a fundamental question. An important one. A question with one of two answers, as near as I can tell.

If everyone is the same as you — every person just as unique in their life, their beauty, their thoughts as you are in yours — does that mean:

a) every single person in the whole wide world is amazingly special and should be treated and respected as such; or
b) no one is special; no one is beautiful; we’re all just like that last drift of ice in lower Manhattan at the end of April: where once there were billions of snowflakes, now is a congealed and hardened heap of gray sludge, serving only to remind us of how cold and dark it’s been.

Now, I realize how you answer this probably says as much about you as it does about the world around us and while I really want to take the a) on this one, I find myself coming back to b) over and over and over. I mean really struggling. This is no mere ethical dilemma for me.

So, you see, I find I’m a few steps ahead when it comes to these Issues of the Mid-30s, thank you very much, and with no real resolution to speak of.

Nevertheless, I seem to be repeating this one story quite a bit.

It was my senior year in college. April or May. I was in the crux of what I was beginning to call my “ongoing existential crisis.” It wasn’t midlife — too early for that — or teenage — too late. But it was a complete questioning of my own existence, my reason for being, along with the existence of the outside world and where and how these things may or may not interact.

I remember, I was particularly feeling it this one Thursday afternoon. I was sitting outside near where I was set to spend the next several hours of the night putting together the school’s weekly paper (as an aside it is with no small irony that I note I held the same title in my career then, “managing editor,” that I do now, fourteen years later).

Questions swirled in my head about what I’d be doing after graduation, who I’d be working for, where I’d be living, what I’d be doing with my time. And more than that — the ever-present “why?” There’s an intellectual distancing here that goes along with this paralytic line of inquiry. One psychologist called it a deep-seated defense mechanism that keeps me from engaging with the world in order to protect myself from the risk of rejection that goes right along even the most basic social interactions.

Just then, the adviser for the school paper — an alum and former burnout who discovered ambition and became a PBS producer — sees me sulking, head in hands.

“What’s going on?” he asked me. Showing actual concern.

I explained, in at least as much detail as I’ve shared with you here.

“Don’t worry,” he consoled me. “I know it’s hard now. And it will continue to be hard. But after a while those fears go away. After a few years, all these feelings will fade.

“Don’t worry, dude. You’ll figure it out.”

Later, my psychologist said that I hold on too hard. She’s one of the few people whom I’ve told that it actually hasn’t gone away. That I’ve never figured it out. The ongoing existential crisis has changed, turned, ebbed, flowed and always been right there with me. Every day.

My former adviser, well, we had a falling out over, I kid you not, a murderous group of marauding black teenagers. So I don’t know what he would say to me now.

But these days, when friends come to me one-by-one and want to explore the issues of aging, relevancy, hipsterdom and their new-found place firmly outside coveted advertising demographics, I patiently listen. I nod. I smile. I tell them that these kids we’re watching now, they’re actually us. We can continue to be them. And it’s okay that we don’t stay out late on weeknights. It’s okay that we’re not fucking like we used to. It’s okay that our own interests have actually shifted so that it’s not just that we don’t do it, but more, even, we don’t want to do it anymore.

All that’s okay.

Life is change. And if we really think about, it becomes clear (to me anyway) that all this is looking backwards. And looking backwards at what we’ve been and where we’ve been and who we’ve been with, it’s keeping us fixated on the past.

And not just the past but this romantic version of past events and identities that really don’t give credit to what was truly exciting about that time.

It was the mystery. The unknown. That we were (sometimes literally) feeling our way through. Living off our wits and stamina and pushing ourselves and everyone else as hard as we could (again, sometimes literally).

It’s not the five Ws that made things exciting then but the H:

Always looking forward in anticipation of the next big or small thing.

Cherishing what comes next, especially when we had absolutely no idea.

Living viscerally in the moment — past collapsing and future visible only as a tight cone.

Learning. Discovering. Opening our hearts. Our minds. Feeling new stimuli. Figuring out what it all means. What ever it may be.

So.

All that to say.

Please enjoy these latest moments pulled out of the past for you to enjoy today.

And please, as you’re doing so, think about this one question for me: what’s next?