Golden Aging

(2024-01-30/2024-02-03)

This will be fairly scatterbrained. I'll say here nothing that you've never learned.

I'm still pretty much a kid. When I grow up, will I care how much time I spent on what? How well I managed my time? This is the trite, intense pressure of the early twenties: Everything I do now, every investment made and unmade, co-creates my future. This holds at every age. But now, in particular, plenty of people remind me.

What legacy will I leave? Will I love enough, speak my mind, share my perspective? Will I make enough [money/of a difference] to engrave anything on history at all? (And who cares about legacy and history?)

And what have I already become? What would my past self think of me now? We give young kids too little introspective credit. Long ago, I thought a great deal about what it means to be social, to belong to a community. They were simpler thoughts than I have now, but they taste the same.

They taste of an old fear. Of being forgotten, disliked, a burden, or abandoned. Normal in small doses. Annoying in moderate ones. Problematic when let fester and swell.

My young self would be disappointed that I've healed so slowly and incompletely. But I guess he was pretty hard on himself.

Kintsugi has always been a tempting metaphor for personal growth. Its practitioners heal ceramic fractures beautifully, proudly, not invisibly, in gold. But if we're of clay, we're never fired. Nothing sets us in stone. There is no static moment in my history, notwithstanding tricks of memory.

So we're scored, and let's mix golden dust into our slip. Living a life will incorporate it over years with intense, tectonic pressure until our healing, our shared work, is known only by a subtle glimmer for a few minutes when the sun meets the ground.