I was having trouble sleeping a couple nights ago, so I read some Kay Ryan poems to settle my brain a bit.
This one helped:
Tag: aging
If you’re 30% through your life, you’re likely 90% through your best relationships. Some really great visuals in this one – how many books you might read, how many times you might go swimming – and then it comes to this:
I’ve been thinking about my parents, who are in their mid-60s. During my first 18 years, I spent some time with my parents during at least 90% of my days. But since heading off to college and then later moving out of Boston, I’ve probably seen them an average of only five times a year each, for an average of maybe two days each time. 10 days a year. About 3% of the days I spent with them each year of my childhood. Being in their mid-60s, let’s continue to be super optimistic and say I’m one of the incredibly lucky people to have both parents alive into my 60s. That would give us about 30 more years of coexistence. If the 10 days a year thing holds, that’s 300 days left to hang with mom and dad. Less time than I spent with them in any one of my 18 childhood years.
Damn.
How Friendships Change When You Become an Adult
“The real bittersweet aspect is young adulthood begins with all this time for friendship, and friendship just having this exuberant, profound importance for figuring out who you are and what’s next,” Rawlins says. “And you find at the end of young adulthood, now you don’t have time for the very people who helped you make all these decisions.
It is not the young man who is most happy, but the old man who has lived beautifully; for despite being at his very peak the young man stumbles around as if he were of many minds, whereas the old man has settled into old age as if in a harbor, secure in his gratitude for the good things he was once unsure of.
Epicurus. So yeah, I accidentally started a retirement tag today.
Before having children, and provided we’ve moved on a little from the maelstrom of adolescence, it is possible to think of ourselves as good people: patient, kind, loving, tolerant. A few years of parenthood strips us of these illusions and we see ourselves in the raw: capable of fury, rage, pettiness, jealousy — you name it. For children confront us with the infantile aspects of our own personalities, the parts of ourselves we’d most like to deny, and we can hate them for it. Worse still, they can thwart our wish, even our need, to feel loving and effective.
That’s Edward Marriott on ambivalent parenting. Cf. Megan McArdle:
I wonder if we ought to re-examine our commitment to happiness. It seems to me that there’s possibly some merit – if we persevere and have the sense to learn from it – in the other-orientation that is (good) parenting. It’s fine to go through life happy, in other words, but I suspect we also want to go through life without becoming big fat self-absorbed jackasses. Children really help in that regard.
To be sure, there are too many parents who, despite their children, remain narcissistic nimrods. But the nature of parenting is to beat that out of you. There’s just no time to spend on ourselves, at least not like we would if we didn’t have babies to wash and toys to clean up, usually in the middle of the night, after impaling our feet on them.
People are inherently self-centered, and especially in a peaceful, prosperous society, this easily leads to self-indulgence that in turn can make us weak and ignoble. There’s something to be said for ordeals – like parenting, or marriage, or tending the weak and broken – which push us into an other-orientation. When we have to care for someone, we get better at, well, caring for people. It actually takes practice, after all.
Understanding a fan’s relationship with management in sports – Grantland
You hit 30, 35, 40, and the life of a professional athlete seems more and more remote. It’s one of a million pasts that never happened rather than a future you can dream about. And the experience of the coach is simply much more accessible to almost every grown-up fan than the experience of any high-level player. And not just because so many fans go on to coach their kid’s T-ball team or whatever; think of it as a lifestyle question. The coach doesn’t have to be able to score from an overhead kick or throw a football 80 yards; he has to run meetings, make plans, juggle lists, and justify himself, same as anybody. He does paperwork. Maybe hops on the treadmill when he can. He’s still connected to the magic of sports, but with him it takes the form of inspired halftime speeches and brilliant late-game stratagems — basically work e-mail lifted to a spiritual plane. More than anything, he has to watch a ton of games: obsess about what’s not working, get mad at players who screw up, praise players who do well.
Understanding a fan’s relationship with management in sports – Grantland
The Age of Reason. There are a couple scary things here. (via)
I’m 59 years old. I don’t care about these technology pets they have.
If you lose your cellphone, don’t blame Wayne Dobson – ReviewJournal.com. I’d never thought about this:
In 1997, cellphone users were roughly one in three callers to 911 dispatchers. And dispatchers didn’t know what to do in situations where the person couldn’t, or didn’t, provide their location. For land lines, dispatchers automatically knew where they were. If you were in Chicago calling from a cellphone with a 702 area code, for example, Chicago dispatchers would forward the call to Las Vegas police.
Age and experience will slowly whittle away at your dreams, so don’t do that to yourself. Let other people do that to you.
Right on Cue – Ta-Nehisi Coates – The Atlantic
Age, like all power constructs, (race, gender, class) encourages it’s own ignorance. To not know is a luxury of power. You don’t have to know Their Eyes Were Watching God. But I damn sure better know The Scarlet Letter. (It’s bad enough I’m slipping on Twain.) Age turns ignorance into a luxury, and worse, if you don’t recognize it as a luxury you start to think everyone is as clueless as you. And of course you’re clueless that any of this is even going on. It’s just a bad look all around.
(via)
For if he shall begin to fall into dotage, perspiration and nutrition and imagination and appetite, and whatever else there is of the kind, will not fail; but the power of making use of ourselves, and filling up the measure of our duty, and clearly separating all appearances, and considering whether a man should now depart from life, and whatever else of the kind absolutely requires a disciplined reason, all this is already extinguished. We must make haste then, not only because we are daily nearer to death, but also because the conception of things and the understanding of them cease first.
Marcus Aurelius, reminding you that even if you live a long life, those last years probably won’t be very useful. Have a great day!
I was on the streets for more than half of my life from the time I was thirteen years old. People sometimes say that now I’m so far away from that life–now that I’ve got businesses and Grammys and magazine covers–that I have no right to rap about it. But how distant is the story of your own life ever going to be?
No, no, there is no going back.
Less and less you are
that possibility you were.
More and more you have become
those lives and deaths
that have belonged to you.
You have become a sort of grave
containing much that was
and is no more in time, beloved
then, now, and always.
And so you have become a sort of tree
standing over a grave.
Now more than ever you can be
generous toward each day
that comes, young, to disappear
forever, and yet remain
unaging in the mind.
Every day you have less reason
not to give yourself away.
40 Things I Learned in My First 40 Years – Bryan Caplan | EconLog
4. Obsessiveness is a powerful solution for physical and social problems. Unfortunately it’s also a major cause of emotional problems.
9. Your mind ages at a slower rate than you expect when you’re young, your body at a faster rate.
40 Things I Learned in My First 40 Years – Bryan Caplan | EconLog
Sexual Politics of Dancing: The Secrets of Looking Good on the Dance Floor
This whole article is great. (via)
The largest degree of satisfaction can be found in girls under the age of 16. “They see dance as something fun, not as part of mating behavior,” says Lovatt. That changes around the age of 16. “Between 16 and 20, dance confidence among girls falls markedly,” says Lovatt. “Girls begin to see dance as a social act rather than a way of expressing themselves. They begin to worry about how they look and start searching for a boyfriend.”
But once young women have come to terms with their lost dancing innocence, the satisfaction ratings start rising again. From the age of 20 onwards, their opinion of their own dance floor competence starts to improve and keeps increasing until the age of 35. After that it hits a plateau, however, as satisfaction levels stagnate. From 55 onwards, the value even drops. “That coincides with the menopause,” says Lovatt. And it doesn’t get any better: “Dance confidence remains low for the rest of a woman’s life.”
The pattern is somewhat different among men. Their dance confidence levels keep rising until the mid 30s. It then stagnates before starting to sink from the age of 55 onwards. But then, surprisingly, men get a second wind. From 65 on, they start to once again see themselves as pretty smooth operators on the dance floor.
Sexual Politics of Dancing: The Secrets of Looking Good on the Dance Floor
Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony
On NPR, a conversation about Holden Caulfield, protagonist of The Catcher in the Rye. The literary remembrance has some interesting segues into how you read the book differently as you grow older, the beginnings of a teenage culture in the ’50s, and whether or not you can imagine Holden as an adult.
Mark Larson 