Birthdays

"I'm going down to the well tonight
I'm going to drink till I get my fill
Sitting back trying to recapture,
a little of the glory
Well time slips away
Leaves you with nothing mister
but boring stories ..."

-Bruce Springsteen, Glory Days




Whether we like it or not, none of us are getting any younger. Today I turned 27. Like most twenty-somethings watching the sun set on the best years of their lives, birthdays have little or no significance to me what so ever. The protesters will say, relax. You're just a kid! A pup, wet behind the ears, green and untested. The truth is I don't feel young. Not like I felt when I was a starry eyed underclassmen with a university of possibilities laid at my feet. I thought jobs would come begging after graduation. Figured I'd be well on my way to beat reporter for a major newspaper in some big city by now. Maybe not The New York Times but at least The Post, right?

How wrong I was. The world is much more brutal then any of us could have ever imagined. A leg up is rare. Most are too worried about covering their own ass. Life can suck. Regardless today I will celebrate my birth. I will go out to a nice dinner with friends, bar hop, drink too much, do my best not to puke on my nice cloths while still trying to get laid (guaranteed three of those five things will happen). What I won't do is freak out. Even if the lid to life's pressure cooker is slowly starting to seal. The water simmering and the tension mounting. Thirty is staring down the barrel of a shotgun with the intent to slaughter whatever inner-child I have left. Adulthood has reared its' ugly head. I'm making decisions now that will set a course for the rest of my life. My youth, waving it's white flag, is dying a slow death.

Well maybe I'm freaking out, just a little bit. To be honest birthdays have always been kind of bizarre to me. At 11:59 p.m. the day before you're one age, sixty seconds go by ... wham! You're one year older. Like you magically matured in the blink of an eye.

"Oh I'm sorry kid, I can't serve you that beer ... oh wait ... Yes sir! Sit down and have a frosty one on me." Who's to say when someone can or can't drink responsibly? I know grown men and women, older then myself, who have no business touching the sauce but it sure as hell doesn't stop them.

Everyone knows it's all downhill after 21 anyway but the truth is growing older happens gradually. We all mature at different rates physically and mentally. It's a gracefully process for some but others aren't so lucky. One group are old souls, wise beyond their years. The other cling to their youth, stuck in a never ending midlife crisis, grown men and women who behave like children. They go an entire lifetime without maturing cognitively at all. So unlike tangible aging, growing wiser is much more of a choice. Everyone's body peeks physically at some point and inevitably begins to break down. If you eat right and exercise yours will last longer but do the same rules apply to our minds?

In other words, at what point are we each smartest and will it all be down hill from there? My generation, which has the attention span of a retarded chimp, wants the answers to quandaries like this right NOW! With the rise of the internet, social networks, Wikipedia and the like isn't everyone getting smarter faster ... and at a younger age? Probably the exact opposite. The problem is there are no easy answer to the questions worth asking. As I've gotten older I've come to except this. Truth is more of a murky gray as opposed to a black or white but it's taken me 27 years to come to peace with it.

I've heard tales that we all have three periods of "cognitive awaking" at different points in our lives. The first comes at puberty, the change from child to young-adult. The second at midlife, (young-adult to adult) and the third in later life, when we accept our immanent mortality. Some may have one, none or all three of these awakenings. Personally, I feel I'm on the cusp of the second. So with the passing of each year I no longer become melancholy but rather hopeful. I've traversed the path of childhood and I'm no longer a young-adult: naively optimistic, impressionable and gullible. On some level I've grown up, all be it ever so slightly. My mind has renewed vigor, purpose and direction. For the first time in awhile I'm thinking more clearly and critically. The words flow from my fingertips to the keyboard easier then ever before. I'm not at midlife (hopefully) but my first steps across the adult threshold have been taken and there's no turning back.

Maybe similar realizations are just around the corner for you. Keep all this in mind when your next day of reckoning comes. Birthdays are simply a way of documenting the passage of time, for posterity sake. They really don't mean anything. One person's 27 is anothers 21. Either way it's just a number and it has a different meaning to everyone. Don't despise becoming an adult, enjoy the experiences along the way that have earned you that rank. Learn from them. They are a badge of honor, not a curse and as sand trickles through your hour-glass spend the time growing wiser, not older. The former is totally in your control and the latter happens whether you like it or not.


-J.R.