Limping and Shitting

I've really been enjoying middle age after decades of flinching at comets.

Shit, as innumerable sages have observed, happens. Until you've developed triage skills, you can never be sure what can really persecute you, derail you, ruin you, hurt you, kill you, or, worst of all, "go on your permanent record" (the most PTSD-inducing phrase ever devised). So you devote most of your time and attention to a frantic game of whack-a-mole. As with all ordeals, you don't realize how bad it was until you've gotten past it.

You can't outrun the ordeal via distance, but you can outlive it via time. At age 57 I don’t freak out much, because I know what to disregard and what to address. I know what passes easily and what passes painfully yet nonetheless passes. I know why people do what they do, and I know it hardly ever has anything to do with me.

Here's a particularly elegant statement (despite the slightly clunky depiction of framing) of that last part (from some new age dude I'm not otherwise super into):

"Don't Take Anything Personally. Nothing others do is because of you. What others say and do is a projection of their own reality, their own dream. When you are immune to the opinions and actions of others, you won't be the victim of needless suffering."

A real world example of this calming level of self-knowledge: I just had two trivial tasks to deal with. I knew from experience that I'd probably forget task #2 while executing task #1. And while it was trivial, I know that daemons never die. Every alarm you've ever set for yourself still rings, stridently but very softly, just below conscious awareness.

So I'm very judicious about setting mental alarms (i.e. daemons - subliminal processes that are just as vexing as the demons of folklore). That's why I write stuff down. Before I did task #1, task #2 was scrawled onto my to-do list, though most people would never have bothered to record such a trivial and transient thing. The very act of recording it relieved me of burden. Another demon slain!

It wasn't a question of ensuring that the task got done. I just saved myself from setting an internal alarm (i.e. unleashing a demon), which would have forever throbbed along with the billions of previous alarms (i.e. screaming demons from hell).

I always figured old people wrote stuff down because they were forgetful and feeble. That's completely wrong. Young people are at least as feebly forgetful, but they lack self-awareness. They don't remember better, they just haven't yet owned up to their forgetfulness. Like buffoons in comedy movies, they divide their time between 1. messing up, and 2. cluelessly refreshing their delusions of competence.

I've learned from long experience that I'm a screw-up. So I write stuff down, which takes just a sec, and I live competently and calmly. 30 years ago, my failure rate was high and I was a wreck. So who's the feeble one?

Aging shows you your folly, and, if things synch up on schedule, puts you in a frame of mind to gracefully accept this truth (that's what maturity is: realizing you're not a fabulous hero, but merely This Guy). Knowing the truth, it naturally follows that you'd take remedial steps to foolproof and error-check your imperfect self, the poor dear. Young people are revolted by remedial measures, which remind them of crutches and diapers. So they recoil in horror - ugh! - and go on to obliviously limp and shit all over the place.


This is the best view of how younger people look to older people: spoiled children perennially raging at the world for not hewing to their preferences.