The Best Time Is Now, Honey

I recently celebrated a birthday. Twenty-eight, to be specific. And this year, with a fully formed frontal cortex and fewer red solo-cup parties, I’ve found myself with more time to think. Really think. For me recently, some of this deep contemplation has been about my mother. I am now the same age she was a year into her radiation treatment for Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. After being diagnosed at twenty-seven, while also pregnant with my oldest brother, Jimmy, she delivered him prematurely, in between cancer treatments, with tumors still encasing her neck and chest. My late twenties have brought me a startling capacity for gratitude. To exist here and now, alongside the people we love, is a stroke of phenomenal fortune far beyond my comprehension.

I’ve been watching young adulthood sunset for a while now. Yet, I must admit that pulling up to twenty-eight feels like that sun dropped out of the sky. My late twenties arrived slowly, encompassing me in adulthood’s obscurity before I felt prepared, or maybe just before I was ready to part with adolescence. Suddenly, I’ve found myself riding this very jarring, polarizing pivot from childhood to middle age. I have a stable job, a humble savings, a semblance of purpose, but God forbid, no partner. As a single twenty-eight-year-old woman, my personal resume triggers dozens of unprovoked, doom-laden questions from acquaintances. As if my position must mean that I am romantically cursed, personally lost, and horribly lonely. It rarely dawns on my interrogators that I’ve chosen this path for myself thus far, and for me, it’s been far richer than the alternatives.

I’ve noticed recently that many of my peers’ life concerns do not align with mine anymore. We’re rapidly branching out into singular directions, personally, geographically, and professionally. Imagine a track race—we all began at the same white, starting line. For a while, we were neck and neck. But recently, I lifted my head up to find that my childhood friends are all running at varying speeds, in individual lanes, with distinct goals in mind. Our positions on the track all shifted, simply because that’s always been our destiny. For hopefully a long time, we’ll all keep circling this track. The weather will fluctuate, and visitors might join us for short sprints, for rest, or for recovery periods. I’m realizing that a major threat to the health of a long-term friendship is just enduring these life stages that collect us at different times—marriage, infertility, layoffs, breakups, loss, abuse, moves, atrocious first dates.

Age forces us to listen to our friends and sympathize with anxieties that may not be our own. For instance, I have one friend mourning a deceased parent and another disheartened by a never-ending egg donor search. Dreadful days will come, and when they do, we must walk each other out of darkness, not because we know where to go, but because we know how to hold each other’s hand. With age, our compassion for those we love has to grow stronger than our lack of understanding for their problems. You see, we’re all running in a circle; no one’s ahead or behind. Wherever they are on the track, you’ll probably be there one day too. Bitterness has no place in these lifelong relationships. There’s no finish line; no winner or loser. In the end, we’ll all collapse under the sun. We’ll recline into the grass patch in the center of the track that we’ve been circling for our whole lives. Our mortality has always been there, but at some point, we’ll be laying in it alongside one another. We’ll be winded from our long run, but we’ll be smiling as we look up at a clear, blue sky.

While on the topic of death, I’ve become painfully aware that what I have now is also what I’ll eventually lose. By late twenties, we’ve all lost something. We’ve met loss in one way or another—a job, a pet, a relationship, a wallet, or a loved one. I’m coming to terms with the fact that everything we have known and everything we will know just evaporates. Whatever it is, it will change. We will change. Our values, the pillars of what support us, will most likely stay consistent, but everything else will shift—our haircut, our address, our coffee order, our idols, our best-fitting jeans, our Saturday night plans, our favorite songs. Existence is brief, so nothing can be permanent. Parting ways with something good because you have conviction in something greater is an act of spirituality. To have faith, in quite literally anything greater than yourself, is to be adaptable. One of my favorite authors, Michael Singer, once wrote, “You naturally begin to center more and more on the spiritual part of your being. You do this not by reaching for the Spirit, but by letting go of the rest.”

I used to fear getting older. I’d pluck the grey hairs sprouting from my crown and spend money I didn’t have on anti-aging cream for the wrinkle deepening on my forehead. Aging reminds me that time is passing. Like all other great battles in life, I think being okay with aging comes down to accepting change more than anything—something my mother is much better at than me. Amid gathering my thoughts for this essay, I asked her a few questions: “if you could go back to one age again, what would it be?”

My mother chuckled and responded, “Oh, I wouldn’t go back. This is the best one, right now.”

“Sixty-five?” I countered.

“Yep.” She retorted. “Sixty-five.”

She’s not one to lie, but this answer seemed mindless, so I dug further: “what about like …thirty-five? You wouldn’t go back?” She rolled her eyes and snickered, as if I was telling jokes.

“Oh no. Are you kidding? Thirties were good, they brought me you, but so much was unclear back then.”

“Explain that” I asked.

She peeled the red reading glasses off the bridge of her nose and let out a long exhale.

“Ok, well, at thirty-five I was a mother of two who desperately wanted to be a mother of four. Financially, things were rocky. I was only a few years into my cancer remission, deathly afraid it’d resurface any day.”

She paused and took a moment to finish.

“Look, I’m proud of how I made through my thirties, but I’d never go back.”

Ok fine, thirties were tough for her. I probed again, “What about twenties? Or forties?”

“Twenties were great, but that’s the kind of fun you only want for a decade. And forties …my forties were tough as hell. I was raising four kids, paying off debt and mortgages, working fulltime then rushing to soccer games and basketball games every night. Like I said, it was the time of my life, but I was just keeping my head above water.”

“So, the best decade, you’d say, has been your sixties?”

“Without a doubt. The best time is now, honey.”

Her response was bewildering to me. I expected her to say twenty-four, fifty-seven, or maybe forty-two. Some random age that I deemed ultimate, perfect, or euphoric. However, according to my mother, that age does not exist. And if it did, the closest thing to it is her age right now. The best time is now, honey. Her words echoed around in my head for a while. This kitchen table conversation encompassed what I’m starting to understand about aging: supposedly, it only gets better. Life, if you zoom out, has an overall upward trajectory. Yes, with time we lose plumpness in our cheeks and color in our hair, but who cares if in exchange we get to blossom? Age largely liberates us from self-doubt. The grooves of what make us us just deepen, and how magical is that? I heard Pamela Anderson recently say, “It’s fun getting older. It’s a relief.” My mother certainly feels the same way, and I’m catching onto this concept too. Learning how we interact with this world is remarkable. Embracing our individuality and discovering where we can meaningfully contribute—these are the real indulgences of a lifetime.

It's during discussions like this one when I can feel my world expanding. The lens of what I know to be true stretched as my mother spoke (miraculous, I know, but don’t tell her that). I strategically cornered her for this chat because I’m interested in aging from a woman’s perspective. The obstacles that come with female ripening are daunting—fertility decline, greying hair, permanent stretch marks, looming Botox, discovering pesky spider veins on our legs and sunspots on our chests. I could cry just listing it all. For better or for worse, as females we’re taught from birth to contribute beauty to this world. And to be beautiful is to be young, right? The youth have a zest that our society worships, an inquisitive drive that seems to slip through the fingertips of grownups. Maybe with age we become nostalgic for their spontaneity? Or their naïveté? But the truth is, maturing will only make our world smaller if we allow it. If we stop chasing curiosity and allow familiarity to lull us into apathy, that is the byproduct of complacency, not the passing decades.

I’m learning now that beauty is not synonymous with being young. Our glorification of youth is dangerous. In fact, according to my mother, someone who’s been evolving for thirty-six years longer than me, beauty is an aura that arises with time. It grows internally from the seeds of intellect, love, and experience.

So, what is aging then? Aging, as I understand it, is the opportunity to keep on learning. Every trip around the sun is just another chance to get it right, to leave this place better than we found it. That is all, and to attach any meaning to growing older beyond that is counterproductive.

Spending time with people decades apart from you is an invaluable investment. Deeply engaging with our parents, grandparents, teachers, mentors, children, grandchildren, students, nieces/nephews, or even neighbors garners a well-rounded outlook for healthy development at all ages. Psychologist Gabor Mate has talked about this concept:

“For so many people, their world begins and ends with their own age group. Which is a developmental disaster. We evolved as creatures in touch with multiple people of multiple ages, and we’ve spent time around people with multiple ages. When you isolate people by age, as this culture lately does, there’s subgroups within subgroups within subcultures within subcultures within a society all based on very shallow identification with age. It just limits our development and our possibilities."

If we only surround ourselves with the same age group, we’re drastically curbing how we see the world. It is only when we consult someone in another stage of life that we can expel some of the misjudgments in our narrow, isolated minds. For example, I’ve recently (ignorantly) assumed that my thirties will be my best decade. However, when I shared that forecast with my sixty-five-year-old mother, she laughed at me. She downright cackled. The decade that I romanticize now is one that she would never go back to. Don’t get me wrong, idealizing future life chapters is imperative; we all need to dream. But do yourself a favor and think more about today. Our elders and our children are some of our finest advisors, and if we try to understand the world as they see it, we just might stumble upon joy.

As I close in on thirty, I like to think that I’ve spent my twenties exactly how sixteen and sixty-year-old me would have wanted me to—experimenting a lot—trying on various hobbies, hairstyles, cities, and boyfriends. Some people, things, and habits have stuck around, but most have come and gone. Twenty-eight is an age that sits on the cusp of change, feeling a lot like twelve or eighteen. I know that the next phase will be vastly unlike where I’ve already been. However, unlike twelve or eighteen, I have a small confidence in my durability. There’s a quiet, underlying trust in my abilities that wasn’t there a year ago. Whatever heartbreak or disappointment or loss occurs, I’ll recover. I’ve done it before, so I’ll do it again. I’ll save myself, because I sort of know how to now. I care less about what people think than I did two years ago. I like myself noticeably more today than I did at seventeen, twenty-one, or even twenty-five. So, the reports are in. The trend is strong. It turns out that getting older is a gift.

My birthday this year didn’t bring me to tears as it usually does, but rather, it sort of blurred my nostalgia. My typical fixation on where I’ve been and who I’ve lost has faded, I’d say, from a constant buzzing to a forgettable hum. For some mysterious reason, twenty-eight has sweetened the moment. It’s underscored what I have right now, and as my mother brought to light, what may lie ahead. The years keep passing and for the first time, I’m finding that thrilling. I suppose, I’m just trying to hold onto life a little looser. So, with all of that said, I know a few things at twenty-eight, but I also know that I know very little.