I called an old friend today. She just got back from Paris, and I from Melbourne. We both haven't changed much, still incredulous at how the world works, how we often feel like tortoises, blissed out with our crazy notions of living and given such a shock when we poke our heads out and realize that everyone else has such weird ideas about how to live! We talk about not talking about getting older. Thirtysomethings. Milestones. Adulthood. Are we more comfortable, more attuned with what we want than we were twentysomethings?
It's funny and amazing and somewhat beautifully fragile that we both riff off the same complaints. Our recent trips didn't generate the oohs, aahs, or even the dislocation that comes with alien places. She had lived in Europe before, and Pari's DNA - cosmopolitan and big and gravitationally very fond of itself - was etched into many squares of the continent. Melbourne reminded me of a medium sized US city stuck in the 1970s approximating the idea of a British town. We both spent New Year's Day thinking of better experiences, those that can rip us out of comfort zones, forcing us to live harder, faster and louder.
We're likely to to grow into crotchety seniors, never happy with new experiences because they don't compare with the old times.
There's truth to that unenviable fact of adulthood: the more I learn, the more I see the limitations of things. When I was 22, I saw the world as something to embrace, to love unconditionally because everything was generous and new and grand and achingly easy to feel. Each new place was a revelation, each meal a discovery of tastes and smells that I hadn't appreciate before -- each relationship soul searing and universally absolute -- each friendship to last forever.
When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
1 Corinthians 13: 11
Now, friends rave about a Caribbean beach, and it doesn't compare to the secret lagoon in the Andaman Sea. New York foodies swear by a fusion eatery, and the food insults my palate. Dave Chang and Spice Market and all the rest – they're like Urban Outfitters pushing pale imitations of real local fashions – delivering bland renditions of what was authentic, real and necessary; how can you compare overly sweet, overly simple flavors to the stuff steaming from those secret alleys (where) yellow glows and tinkling plates floated on the sounds of happy slurps and burps and grunts from diners crouched beside street stalls full of real food, the ones resulting from the collective memories of their cultures, from moms and grandmothers and aunties?
That mountain, it's not the highest nor the most snow covered nor the most pointy. I've seen better. That jungle – are there orangutans? And don't get me started on waterfalls. I've swam in cascades of the bluest waters you've ever seen.
I annoy myself.
I glance around and suddenly there are less kindred spirits. With wisdom comes criticalness and irritability. There's no time to love everyone, to allow anyone or everyone to impress themselves on your slate. When I was young, I was a blank canvas. I soaked up all the stories and opinions of my companions. But now, now after having gone through a twentysomething navel gazing period, struggling to form my own judgments, hacking away at extraneous ideas with skepticism, I don't want to go back to that time again, when everything could be right and worth a try. That's too tiring. Not everything is worth a try.
Instead, I'll keep on the lookout for things that I know are beautiful and joyous and tumultuous and leave the bland and ugly and sentimental to younger souls, who are still pure enough to cloak themselves with multi-colored abandon. That is, I'll look harder for those kindred spirits and hang on tight to the good old friends – and we'll continue to aspire to simple greatness and marvel at the small paradoxes that make us loopy: how the world can be so complex when happiness is so simple, how we bind ourselves with constraints made of whispers, how how expectations are really young but history is always forgotten, how men can love things so much but not each other, how we always seem to have the best ideas when they don't matter much anymore...