Pleasures of No Longer Being Very Young!

It was a bright Sunday morning as I woke up very late in the summer of 2020, feeling surprisingly light headed and happy. I felt a strange sense of relief! I recalled the events of the previous day and got out of my bed with a smile on my face and a flight in my step!

Thanks to some amazing organization and technology it had felt like I had a full blown birthday bash despite my milestone birthday coming during a pandemic lock down! And with family in India +12 hours ahead, my phone had started buzzing the previous night itself making it a non-stop 36 hour celebration! It was a very eventful day… Surprise birthday decorations by my family, flowers & chocolate deliveries during the day, the evening brought two masked girl friends with gifts, balloons and cake for an intimate yet socially distanced backyard surprise, pre-planned zoom calls with friends and families that I wasn’t aware of including one very chaotic hour with over 20 cousins that took me back to my childhood days in India. The day ended with one last surprise… personal video messages from my very large extended family played on big screen TV!! This was an entirely unexpected and very touching gesture especially since I had just been on video calls with most of them! As I watched these with smiles and a few with moist eyes, I completely forgot I had spent the day in quarantine!!

The days leading up to my 50th birthday however had been very chaotic. Outwardly I was just fine but there was an emotional turmoil brewing up within me. I had this constant realization at the back of my mind that I had reached the mountain top and was about to start the downward journey of my life. Despite the increasing life expectancy and 50 being the new 40 and possibility of medical science springing up new surprises, 100 will still be as good as it gets. And honestly I’m not sure I’d want to live that long anyways. A life where I’m not mentally sharp and physically disabled..?

I knew it wasn’t in my hands to change the clock and I should just go with the flow. They say it’s the circle of life but to me it seemed more like the stream of life. The water can’t flow upstream, it always flows downstream and in one direction only. So there were days when I was fine and yet there were those anxious moments when my vanity got the better of me. And at times when I would have completely forgotten about it, someone else would invariably remind me with a “Hey it’s your 50th birthday this year!” Or a “Hey what’s the plan? How will you celebrate your 50th?!” or “Oh it’s too bad your 50th is gonna be in quarantine!!” Then there was the “We must celebrate your 50th next year since we can’t do it this year” which meant this torment would continue for another year?! No thank you unless you can actually pause my biological clock for a year or rewind it.

As the month of August drew close I had almost started seeing the number 50 dancing in front of my eyes whether they were wide open or shut tight. If I gazed at the clouds I’d start imagining the number 50! And as if this wasn’t enough, I started getting life insurance coverage plans for senior citizens and AARP membership invitations in the mail! (AARP, the American Association of Retired Persons, is a US based interest group focusing on issues affecting those over the age of fifty). I cringed every time I saw the old man promoting AARP ads on my television screen because I felt like he was talking directly to me!

With all the build up to this milestone, now that I was over the mountain top and actually started my downward slide, I expected to be sad and depressed but strangely enough I was not! The first thought that popped in my head was how many more years until I can quit working? There was a sense of relief knowing that a big chunk of the donkey years of my life were done with! I have fewer years to keep working than I have been working so far!! I even looked up my retirement account to calculate how much longer to reach my goal. It was exciting to think that I am getting closer to having complete freedom to do whatever I want with my time! There actually was light at the end of the tunnel! It’s not that I haven’t enjoyed any of the things I’ve done so far. In fact I’ve been blessed with a good life so far and thankful for it. But on the journey from 40 to 50, life had gotten quite stressful and the last decade seems to have whizzed away like a breakaway train. Trying to get kids through High School & into college, (one is still in HS!), driving around Moms Taxi for their “endless” extra-curricular activities and all this while balancing home & office work. Add to it a husband who was constantly on the road. So I’m actually looking forward to a slower pace of life in three more years.

I had always made a mental list of things that I have wanted to do in life but kept putting my interests on the back burner as work and family always took precedence. Now I opened my cell phone and created a new note titled “My Bucket List” to make a real black and white list!

Suddenly a phrase rang in the back of my head — “The pleasures of no longer being very young”. I scratched my head and vaguely recalled sitting in my English Literature class in India. I was a 19 year old full of expectations from life, looking forward to my 20s and excited with anticipation for this next decade in my life which I had always imagined would be the most adventurous period of my life. (And it sure didn’t disappoint me!) As we settled down in the classroom, Professor Rajwade made us open this very ridiculous sounding essay by G.K. Chesterton titled On the Pleasures of No Longer Being Very Young. As she went on with how Chesterton was the Prince of Paradox etc., I sat politely pretending to pay attention. I recalled it was loaded with phrases with the author spinning wit and humor around them. The title itself was quite paradoxical but apparently not funny enough because I still wasn’t quite interested in this futile conversation on a dull topic such as old age. I didn’t recall the full content of the essay anymore but the phrase had stuck in my sub conscious and popped out literally hours within me turning 50!!! How incredible was that?!!

I couldn’t help looking it up on the web while wondering what Chesterton would have said of people in the 21st century googling him?! Perhaps he would have thought the word in context of the “Googly”, a type of delivery in cricketing terminology, and cracked some delightful joke around it? Anyways, I found the entire essay loaded with Chestertonian wit & humor and I must admit I did enjoy reading it a lot more this time than I did when I was over three decades younger or shall I just say three decades less older?!

After I read the essay I made a separate list of all the benefits I will soon start enjoying. Soon to come financial perks like special travel deals and auto insurance discounts, grocery store, retail & restaurant discounts. And I could get freedom from that very obnoxiously large white elephant, the Private Health Insurance in America, soon as I can get on to Medicare! Its our single largest expense as a family draining away our bank accounts faster than a crater would drain water from a bucket! Soon I won’t need to keep learning new technologies every other day because I think I will be able to manage my life fairly well with what I have learnt so far and with the gadgets I already own. (You guessed it right… I’m not exactly a gadget freak!) Given a choice I’d rather spend my time reading and gardening over acquiring new technologies, figuring out new hand held devices or wasting my time on social media. Besides isn’t ageing just a biological process? As my Dad would always say, “I am always young at heart so I never grow old”. He was right! I decided I am going to take my yoga more seriously and start meditation (which I actually have since then). A sense of liberation had stirred within me and here I was, contrary to what I had feared, actually excited on turning 50!

Now I can argue with the younger generation by saying things like I know better because I’ve seen more life than you have and while in past they could have pointed out it’s obvious I’ve seen more life than they have which still holds true and always will but now there is more meat in my argument! I can say with pride new is silver but old is gold or say with a sense of authority things like my hair is turning grey with 50 years of experience and have the license to crack wise jokes! Or like Chesterton I can argue “How do the young even know that their view is modern if they haven’t experienced the old? It’s like not really knowing that the earth is moving unless you look at it from a distance!” To argue further, I’d say the young will call the shape of a box a square but an older person will call it a cube with depth and dimensions! Or a ball as a sphere and not merely a circle? And so it will be with most situations in life as experience will always give more depth and dimensions to them.

When I was first introduced to G.K. Chesterton I was looking forward to my 20s and this time around I am looking forward to the decade 2020s! I want to start living the second innings of my life on my own terms rather than constantly being dictated by circumstances. There is so much more to do and I’ve already crossed the halfway mark! Wordsworth famously wrote “The woods are lovely dark & deep but I have promises to keep”. But I guess a day comes when one has to learn how to steal time for that walk before the woods are chopped away! (Metaphorically or sadly even otherwise). It’s not as difficult I’ve realized although I admit it will be more challenging once this pandemic lock down is fully lifted. Some of my readers who are in their 30s and 40s don’t quite have that option yet so at the risk of being called callous I’ll say turning 50 hasn’t been a bad deal after all. Besides I have to be thankful for having lived for 5 decades! Come to think of it, in 1800s global life expectancy was between 30 to 40 years and it was 50 in the year 1900! Not to mention I’ve been very fortunate to have made it unscathed through the 2020 global pandemic.

Since turning 50 my personal happiness quotient has already gone up as I have started pursuing the goals on my bucket list! Writing was one of them and although I can’t be certain if you my readers are enjoying this as much, but after overcoming some initial anxiety, I sure am enjoying writing!! At times it has also been very cathartic. And if my readers are not enjoying what I write I still intend to pursue it for the joy this writing brings to me and coming back to G.K. Chesterton… “The proverb there is no fool like an old fool might be true but it’s also true that perhaps no fool is half as happy in his own fool’s paradise!!”

So 2021 here I come to start enjoying the pleasures of no longer being very young!!!