Mark Twain doesn’t get the credit he deserves.
Oh, he’s obviously respected, even revered, as one of the great writers in American literature.
But my personal admiration for him transcends the predictable praise for Tom and Huck and Becky or for the jumping frog or even for that gol durn Yankee in King Arthur’s court.
I think he’s never gotten proper credit for summing up what getting older is all about.
“When I was 18”, Twain once said, “I thought my father was the dumbest man I had ever met. By the time I turned 21, I was amazed at how much he had learned in just three short years.”
Doesn’t get any more real than that does it, kids?
Mr. Clemens knew his stuff when it came to putting age into perspective.
So did Mr. Einstein.
Because “age” has nothing to do with the chronological number assigned to you based on the process of subtracting your year of birth from the year in which you are currently living.
It is, rather, a simple matter of relativity.
When I turned fifty, I was asked “hey! How does it feel to turn fifty?”
I didn’t know.
I still don’t.
Because age, itself, doesn’t feel like anything.
If you are ache and pain free at one minute before midnight, the day before your 80th birthday, you don’t automatically start feeling aches and pains two minutes later just because you crossed some illusory boundary.
That’s why the number itself is academic.
And also why we hear, lately, that clever catch phrase about fifty being the new forty, and forty being the new thirty, etc. (which always makes me feel really sorry for ten year olds, but that’s another story..)
The well-worn cliché is that age is a state of mind.
I buy that. With one little revision.
Age is a relative state of mind.
For example, as I have shared before, it really doesn’t bother me, one way or the other, on the face of it, that I am in my fifties.
What I can’t get past is that Ringo Starr will be 68 this year.
How the hell did that happen?
Or realizing that your children have never been alive in a time when we didn’t have color television, microwave ovens or when man had not yet walked on the moon.
And then realizing that your children have children.
There is one other insidious thing that can make you feel old in this life, too.
When you stop dreaming about what’s next.
Be it the dream of the next professional accomplishment, the next personal goal or achievement or simply the next pair of eyes and voice that are going to make your heart do the flutter you first felt what seems like such a long time ago.
When you stop taking chances, start playing it safe and spend your days hiding in your work and your nights watching something from your DVD box set collection. When you come face to face with the chance to bungee jump into a life of new devotion and partnership and feel the hand of that person next to you, holding your hand tightly, promising you that they wont let you get hurt in the fall…and you feel yourself pulling your hand away instead of laughing in joy and jumping for all it’s worth.
Just like a little kid, afraid of the dark.
Ironic, isn’t it?
And a little full circle, too.
From the fear we overcame as children back to the fear we feel as grownups.
The fear of the unknown.
But a more poignantly sad fear…because we know, somewhere in our hearts this time around, what we didn’t know when we were little kids.
That all we have to do is jump.
And it will be okay.
I respect Mr. Twain. And Mr. Einstein.
But I especially appreciate Mr. Thoreau.
He called it “lives of quiet desperation”.
I just call it getting old.
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