"You're always talking about age" moaned my husband at the weekend. This surprised me, because I hadn't previously thought I did. I will confess to thinking about it quite a lot though, especially since my last birthday (on which I turned thirty-three) and the realisation that in just a couple of months' time I will be married to a forty year-old. Even when I look back on those words I can't quite believe them. Me, married to a forty year-old? But I'm not old enough!!
It wasn't the same when he turned thirty and I was twenty-three; when you're that young you don't give that kind of thing a lot of thought. Thirty is a number way off into the distance, and besides I'd only been going out with my husband for three months or so then. I found his anxiety about turning thirty amusing. "It's just an age" I said at the time; "you're still the same person". But you're not, are you, as you age? You do change.
The philosopher John Locke famously wrote about the concept of "personal identity over time"; stating that if you can remember your past actions then you are the same person you've always been, regardless of how you change physically (but we should probably ignore him, because he also said something along the lines of acquitting murderers who can't remember murdering because that proves they were a different person when they committed the crime). If only life were that simple! I think that most people retain remnants of their former selves, but that they are always changing and growing. Or at least I like to think so. I'd hate to be the same person now as I was ten years ago. That person didn't know as much; was far less confident and far more self-absorbed (though what is a blog if it's not about self-absorption?! But anyway...)
I think my thoughts on age may run a bit deeper than most as a result of being the oldest in a (somewhat distorted) family of five girls. My youngest sister is only twelve, so when I'm fifty she won't even be thirty. That's a sobering thought...or at least it is to me. Even though fifty isn't really "old" any more; it is when you're only twenty-nine! You're just not...well...relevant. Even if you're Madonna, struggling to keep up with her twentysomething peers by working out excessively and ensuring her face (as well as various other body parts) is everywhere you look. It doesn't matter how good she looks, or how often she flaunts her veiny, over-aerobicised arms in public though, because younger people barely know who she is, and even if they do they don't care.
When my Dad turned forty he started talking about buying a bar in Spain. He never did this. But I think that when you turn forty you really are at a kind of "life crossroads"; more evident then that at any other milestone age. At thirty people tend to mourn the loss of youth too much and at fifty they're coming to terms with the onset of "old age". So at forty people are thinking "there's still a little bit of time left before I get old...what can I do that's different?" Hence the 'mid-life crisis' famously characterised by sports cars, leopard-print and younger partners. I keep wondering what my 'mid-life crisis' will be, and how I'll come to terms with the ageing process. It almost feels sometimes as though I'm preparing myself for battle!
In the meantime, I promise to stop obsessing over the whole thing and go out and get a nice leopard-print top in the sales.
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