While I was out shopping over the weekend, I walked past a middle-aged couple in a parking lot. The woman glanced toward me and then said something to her husband about wishing to be young again. In fact, she was only a few years older than I am, if that; but I was wearing a sequined blouse and blue-jean shorts, and the wind was whipping my hair across my face, so I suppose she assumed that I had to be young without looking all that closely at me.
I bought the blouse several years ago from a catalog aimed mainly at younger buyers, along with skinny jeans that had pretty embroidery. The jeans are shown in a decluttering post I wrote last year, when I took them to the thrift store because they were a low-cut style that I never felt comfortable wearing (I couldn’t tell from the catalog photo because the model wore the blouse untucked). But anyway, leaving aside the issue of age-appropriate clothing, which could take up an entire post in itself: Would you want to be young again?
Sometimes when I write blog entries having to do with what people think about age, I wonder if I ought to create an “aging” tag for them; but I always end up tagging them as “cultural narratives” instead. The word “aging” is both too general for what I want to say, in that it refers to many things besides people’s attitudes, and too specific in describing a process rather than a wide-ranging set of beliefs.
I do have a “Younger Self” tag that I use for imaginary conversations with myself in the past, which I find helpful for bringing patterns and assumptions to the surface. While it would be nice if I could literally go back in time and give my younger self a few very-much-needed clues, I would much prefer to do it as my present-day self, instead of swapping places and having all those life lessons to struggle through once more.
That’s not to say I am anywhere close to thinking of myself as a wise old woman in the present. To the extent that I can visualize my older self, she sometimes peeks out of a far-distant future to remind me, in a tone of dry amusement, that as far as she’s concerned I am still just a kid with a lot more to learn. I would say that’s good, though. After all, I wouldn’t want to get complacent and stuck in the proverbial rut. Much better if she has more to say a few decades from now, when the world surely will be much changed, about getting out and exploring all those new adventures.
