In this, the two thousand and seventh year of our lord, the earth turned, you bled, sweated, inhaled, exhaled. You found yourself with a great many spectacular and unpleasant events behind you, and a great many equally spectacular and unpleasant events inevitably ahead of you. Let’s recap what you have learnt so far in your life.
You have gained some skill at discerning shape, movement, and color, but you are easily fooled. You have navigated the vagaries of squirming and crawling, then those of the equilibrium and balance necessary for walking. However, often you fall off the sidewalk and collide with objects and people with no discernible explanation.
You have, somewhat, learned to separate the animate from the inanimate, teaching yourself that a chair cannot get up and walk, and purging the beasts and monsters from beneath your bed. But often the closet is ominous in the middle of the night, and the trees lean and claw at you in the woods when you go camping.
You have been struck by the swift brutal blow of puberty, and have unsuccessfully attempted to understand the mechanics of lust, love and desire, both your own and that of everyone else you have wanted to kiss, have sex with. You can perhaps discern the difference between a good wine and a bad one on your palate, and the subtlety between a note correctly struck on an instrument and one that is incorrectly struck. But really what have you learnt that you did not know when you were a child?
You are born, there is a kaleidoscopic streak of color and movement, you are struck, buffeted, taught pain, and there is a fireworks display of electrical explosions in your brain. In this struggle to understand, to organize the chaos that you are confronted with what have you achieved?
When you were a child, navigating the tumult of first being alive, did you wonder what it would be like when the growth of you body had been complete? What you would be like when your limbs were long, thick, when you would be an adult in your late twenties, contending with the world, equipped with all of the wisdom of time spent, discovering, sticking your fingers into unknown places, feeling the shapes of things.
Have you been honest with your ten-year-old self? Have you been as courageous? Is your scar to age ratio as high as it was then? Do you still knock your head against things? Do you leap as indiscriminately, land on your head as often?
You find yourself here now, wondering what it will be like when you are fifty, your face lined, your hair gray, watching your children collide with the world, inexorably grow. Will you be honest to your late-twenties self? What will your fifty year-old self want from you now?
