One may notice, if they cared to, that I’ve eliminated my age from the “apropos blog” section. At first, I included my age in that section for want of maintaining complete honesty as far as the source of these writings and observations. But how much does my own age have to do with such honesty?
In truth, when I reveal my age, people are always, without fail surprised and sometimes even shocked. Across the board, this is true for strangers as well as new friends and long-time coworkers. Remarkably, I’ve even had hairdressers assume I have children (which undoubtedly speaks to the sort of culture and life they’ve grown up with as well as implies an assumed age for me).
When I was younger, I’d constantly hear “Oh, but you’re so mature.”
Come to think of it, my age has done little but hold me back in life. I can remember feeling stifled creatively as a child because my work in poetry, drawing, singing, was never taken seriously. But I had big beautiful words! Big beautiful thoughts! Passionate pencil drawings of people! I was considered a child playing rather than a person working creatively. My passions for numerology, wicca and paganism, astrology, the occult, were dismissed as simple “phases” I was rapidly growing through as a result of my passion for fantasy. The way my parents and other adults in my life dismissed these interests created doubts in me about their legitimacy, and sure enough, my interest in them waned. [Even today, though I am drawn to astrology once more, I am having doubts about becoming versed in it because a small voice from my past writes it off as a crock.]
But fascinatingly, as I reflect on those times in my life I realize that I was around ten years old when I began independently investigating religion. My mother raised an unbelieving Christian, my father barmitzvahed but practicing only twice-a-year Jew, I had free reign to explore these and other different religions and make up my mind for myself concerning spirituality. I read books and asked questions.and researched. At such a young age I decided for myself that Christianity rubbed me the wrong way. I felt ethnically Jewish but again the traditional worship aspect didn’t speak to me. I could get behind Paganism’s celebration of the earth and the elements, but the rituals and spells involved in practice seemed excessive and overly playful. Buddhism I very much believed, but I felt it was more of a philosophy than a religion.
At ten years old I discovered what death meant to me. I remember the moment precisely
sitting low at Gramar’s round wooden table, doused loosely in a stained white tablecloth and swathed in a cover of old spider lace. A lazy Susan sat mid-table – I was always fighting the urge to spin spin spin it around and watch all the cut fruit and stale crackers fly off onto the carpet, already and always strewn with small clots of dirt and hair from a dog long dead and sometimes needles for sewing. The must of that old house my father, uncles, and aunt had grown up in clogged my nostrils with the thickness of stagnant time gone. I sat there in a wooden chair, my shoulders just coming up to the table, family members bustling around me in preparation for passover feast. My favorite holiday. As I sat, something carried me away from the conversations in the room and swiftly, I thought of death. Everything went black. Out like a light. And there was no sight or hearing or touch anymore. There was no thought. There was nothing remotely recognizable to the life I lived every day, there was nothing for me to grasp to or care for or comprehend or appreciate. There was vast nothingness.
I sat at the stained table of lace and stale crackers and felt as if I’d choked on ether. The feeling was wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. Everything about it was wrong. I knew it was wrong. I knew immediately that death was not this swift, intense cutting of your umbilical cord to the world. Nothing in life has proved to be that completely unforgiving. Life is too much of a process. It’s an investment. It’s a rotation of seasons, a game of cycles and multi-facets and ever-expanding knowledge and ability. The ending of life would surely fit the same pattern of all these natural governances.
I decided then that death was surely like a video game, super mario brothers to be exact, and I have the next level to look forward to (And the level after that and the level after that -).
This is the knowledge I gained as a child if you were to limit me by age. Knowledge that I continue to know and use after the passage of such time. And what is it worth to limit that discovery by belittling the age at which it was begotten? It isn’t worth.
And so, a new challenge, is about disowning age.
I am not so completely on board with this concept yet, because I still see small value in keeping age in terms of comparisons and analysis and separating life’s challenges for the sake of learning. However, I also see that the longer I ascribe to my own age the more it will serve to inconvenience me. In measuring my age, I’m sure to feel I haven’t completed all I should yet complete. Or I may hold back from creating because “I can’t possibly know enough yet” or “I’m just not there yet.” My age may force me into untrue decisions about finding romantic partners. Age will give me false ideas about my own physical beauty and capabilities. Age will simply serve to limit me in the future as it has in the past. It will mottle my understanding of myself.
No, I am on board with this: age will no longer exist for me. When people ask me how old I am, I will simply respond that it does not matter. Because it does not. It was always just an erroneous piece of information anyway, created and held firmly in place by the powers-that-be. Age, simply another way to keep the status quo. Hold us back from reaching our full potential. Instill doubt in us, keep track of us, separate us into students/workers/soldiers/alcohol-drinkers. Age, simply another false constructed separation between us and other human beings. I do not need to use age to compare and contrast myself with other people. It is enough for me to know that they are human, struggling human struggles, and in this way we are connected, related, the same.
I am disowning age. Because if I hold on to age, it will automatically age me. Ascribing to age, I will “get older.” And I don’t want to get older. I want to simply be and learn and discuss and create. I should be too busy with life to worry about a false construction like age. Sometimes I feel old and wise, sometimes I feel young and exuberant. I’d rather focus my attentions on these feelings of age rather than some arbitrary number on my driver’s license, constantly used to identify me to those in power.
It’s decided. And I’ve just realized that disowning age is a small form of activism. I do hope others join.
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V'Artichoke 