Anarchy Journal Constitutional

I’ve never dreaded getting older. I’m yet to mind the trade offs that come with aging. Hopefully I have a long way to go still, but tomorrow isn’t promised for any of us.

I still remember coming up in my teens and twenties and every time I was at a party or a bar or a club I would hear someone, both men and women equally, complain about getting older. Lamenting the loss of their youth even though none of these incidents involved someone moaning about being above the age of twenty six.

So that gave me a positively warped view of aging. I never bought it. Every time I ever heard it, whether sober or three sheets to the wind, I always thought the person sounded…uh…less than optimally intelligent.

I don’t pretend that I feel as spry and vibrant as I did ten years ago, or fifteen years ago. But I’ve never felt upset about it, or robbed of something, or like something was missing. Not yet anyway. If I’m lucky enough to live another ten or twenty years maybe that will change.

One of my favorite things about getting older are seeing life cycles. How it’s all the same, only the names will change. The seasons of nature are great metaphors for pretty much every aspect of life. The more time I spend in nature, the more I see and feel this to be true.

I see it in myself, my friends, my family, in pop culture, in society, etc. Cycles. Not lines. Not going from A to B and everything or anything being done. Nothing going up to the top of the metaphorical mountain and stays there. What goes up, must come down, and being again.

I see cycles, circles, patterns, repetition in my own life. I look back and I see myself struggling and succeeding in many of the same areas over and over again, spread out over extended periods of time.

I see more similarities than differences in the different, “eras” of my life, to use modern terminology.

I don’t get angry or disappointed or frustrated at this. Nor do I get filled with pride or superiority. It’s just what is. It’s just what happened. It’s just what’s happening. It’s just what will happen.

I will try. I will plan. I will execute. I will learn. I will apply. I will think. I will review. I will take action. I will let go. What will happen will happen.

I know before meditation, philosophy, and spirituality practices came into my life I never could have been so calm or coherent about my trials and tribulations, my successes and my failure, my drama and my karma, my life situation. After all this is my life…MY LIFE…

I likely would have only been able to see the cycles of life in the cyclical nature of fashion and applied some kind of ego based judgement on people who think they’re “cool” for wearing a style of clothing that was fashionable twenty or more years ago, was deemed uncool for so long that people stopped wearing and forgot about the clothing style, only for it to be brought back again in the name of status, clout, attention, and superficial uniqueness.

But now I love seeing the style of my dress of my youth being brought back into vogue and being enjoyed by a whole new generation of people. I talk to the people wearing throwback fashions, and the majority of people I have talked to love the style, they like how they look in them, they like the aesthetic, many of them have been wearing that style for years and years and it is just now that mainstream culture has caught up to them. How wonderful. The classics never go out of style.

Seeing the cyclical nature of life takes some of the pressure off of myself to be some kind of perfect being. Perfectly unique. Perfectly productive. Perfectly efficient. None of that exists in reality. Only in the areas of our imagination under control of our ego.

Progress, not perfection.

There’s no escaping the yin yang. Ups and downs, peaks and valleys, noise and silence, dark and light, good and bad. Circles, cycles, not lines.

We are all flawed. We are all imperfect. We all repeated the same mistakes and the same successes. We are cyclical, not linear.