A cardboard box has been delivered to your door. It's big enough to contain a full-size suitcase, but when you pick it up to take it inside, you find it light — almost as if it's empty. You grab a knife and slice the tape on the top, open the flaps and cast your eyes on a whole lot of Styrofoam packing peanuts. Eager to get to the treasure beneath the peanuts, you plunge your hands inside, sending a flurry of foamlets over the side. The peanuts are full of static electricity. They cling to your shirt, but you keep desperately pawing through the box. Peanuts fall to the floor and stick to the tops of your shoes. They grab the hairs on your arms, and hold like barnacles to your pants.
It's maddening.
You brush at them, but manage only to transfer them to another part of your body. You sigh, and go back to searching, only to get to the bottom and realize the box never had treasure, only packing peanuts, which are now everywhere — on your clothes, on your skin, on the furniture. And they are a bitch to corral because, well ... static. Getting all those peanuts back in the box is POSSIBLE, but it's really difficult. Every time you think you've gotten them all back in, you find one stuck to your hip or your hair or the dog's tail.
This, I've decided, is exactly what it's like to indulge in worrying about aging. To open that box is to be attacked by staticky thoughts that resist being put away. We pick them off, but they just cling to something else.
Are we "old" yet? Maybe we're older but not, you know, "elderly."
Wait, when does elderly begin?
Are we too old to ride a motorcycle? To wear big earrings?
How old do our younger colleagues think we are?
Have we become the old person in the group and we don't even know it?
We always wanted to learn to play piano, but at this age, what's the point, right?
Years ago, a friend made a joke about how one day he'd start to have the "old man smell" and not even know it. I laughed, but I also thought, "Do old men smell weird? Do old WOMEN smell weird? Am I destined to acquire the old woman smell? Maybe I already smell like an old woman and this is his way of letting me know."
You see what I'm saying, right? Age-fretting is the cardboard box filled with nothing but stupid peanuts, and it's best to resist opening it. There is no treasure inside the worry box. We simply burn the very resource we are most worried about losing.
When I was a 47-year-old pursuing a bachelor's degree in illustration at an art school filled mostly with people born in the 1990s, I fried thousands of brain cells worrying about my age. I obsessed about how age hindered me. How it would prevent me from achieving goals. How perhaps the loss of cognitive elasticity was making me extra-dense and hard to teach. Every struggle or failure was harder than it needed to be, because I had a chorus of terrible devils in my ear, blaming it all on my geriatric situation. Which was, of course, ridiculous. Sometimes we just agelessly fail.
A few of my professors seemed to have sized me up as a self-indulgent housewife, and I got fixated on that for a while before deciding it probably didn't matter.
On the other hand, though — and this is important — I was doing art school. Even though I was pushing 50, I did not think it was weird or wasteful. Inside, I was still me, and that person wanted to be better at making art.
School was exhilarating and rewarding. At times, it was also deeply humiliating to be less skilled than a bunch of 18-year-olds. But not having studied art at 18, doing it now seemed like the next best decision. Much smarter than not doing it at all.
And it was. It was the best. One of the best things I have ever done.
And of course now 10 years have passed, so I see how very young I was at the time.
There's probably a fine line between fretting about age and occasionally partaking in meaningful reflection about our own mortality — taking stock as we move forward on the great conveyor belt of time. I think that's a line worth considering, but you know — not obsessing over.
But by now, most of us have friends or family members who never got the chance to worry about being too old. If they were here, they'd tell us we're lucky. They'd probably suggest we get out of our heads for a while and get on a motorcycle or take up piano or bake a cheesecake or call some friends.
And that's what we should do. Every time we see the box on the porch, we should shove it to the side and carpe the dang diem.