I read a line the other day, in an interview with a successful actor who is just about my age, that the great thing about middle-age is having a lifetime of experience behind you and also ahead of you. And I thought\u2014yeah, that\u2019s pretty much right.\r\n
That kinda resonated with an Ian McKellen line about playing Hamlet this year, where he observed that when he was a young actor in repertory, he frequently played older men. In this case, he has the memory of being thirty to draw on; when he was young, he had no memory of being old.\r\n
I have had a largely uneventful life, thank goodness, so there are an awful lot of things that I haven\u2019t experienced. But at this point, there are a huge number of things that were scary and new the first time that I won\u2019t ever do for the first time again. I\u2019ve traveled to another country; I\u2019ve been mugged; I\u2019ve been married; I\u2019ve had successful surgery. I\u2019ve bought a car and a house. I\u2019ve cooked various kinds of food, and eaten various kinds of food. I\u2019ve had physical therapy. I\u2019ve been short of rent money. I\u2019ve had disposable income. I\u2019ve paid off a student loan. I\u2019ve raised children. I\u2019ve screwed up and had my electricity cut off and had to have it turned on again. I\u2019ve been laid off. I\u2019ve lost friends and sometimes reconnected with them. I\u2019ve had the basement flooded. I\u2019ve gone swimming in the ocean.\r\n
I graduated from college more than ten thousand days ago. In another five thousand or so, if everything goes well, I will be retirement age. It\u2019s not that nothing scares me any more\u2014lots of things scare me now, maybe even more than when I was thirty. It\u2019s that the vast array of things that are likely to happen to me are things I have already done, or are a lot like things I have already done, or things that I\u2019ve supported close friends and family as they\u2019ve gone through them or done them. I don\u2019t feel unprepared for a lot, these days. Scary things will happen; I will probably handle them like I handled the scary things that have already happened. Awesome things will happen; I will probably handle them like I handled the awesome things that have already happened.\r\n
And if I can say this in the middle (or just maybe close to the end) of a pandemic, then really: I am middle-aged now.\r\n
It\u2019s pretty awesome.\r\n
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,<\/I>
-Vardibidian.\r\n\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Which Your Humble Blogger did the arithmetic to determine the approximate number of Monday mornings left in my work life, and you know, it could be worse.","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20437","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20437","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20437"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20437\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20438,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20437\/revisions\/20438"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20437"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20437"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20437"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}