The best part about long-time friends is that catching up can be like picking up an unfinished board game with ease, as though everyone miraculously remembers the game state, regardless of how long it has been. You have this kind of understanding that can only be the product of many years of witnessing each other.
L and I have talked about getting older for as long as we've been friends. Maybe a shared obsession with the passage of time and nostalgia for the present is part of why we have always been so close. We've always been worrying about how much time has passed. Or that we are (or were) sleepwalking through the "good old days."
Now we're both thirty. We're wiser now, at least relatively. We're a little more okay with ourselves. We're in less of a rush. We spend less time stressing about what could have been, but we both have our moments.
The other day we talked about knowing ourselves better, knowing what goes into a good day, and knowing what fills us up. We talked about our personal tennis balls. L said,
"I wish I wasn't making all these realizations at thirty. It's like that song. I think about it all the time:
I wish that I knew what I know now
When I was younger
...I feel that every day."
When he said it, I laughed. For two reasons.
First, because I completely understand how he feels. I have the same thought all the time. Time seems to move by more and more quickly. With it comes expectations, competing desires, tradeoffs, and thinning options. We're both people who, at our most effective, are obsessive. L put it as "an inclination to have a thing that occupies all of my energy and life force." When you're younger, you have so much time and space and energy. You have so much room to fail. You just need to know what direction to run in. If only I knew what I do now when I was twenty...
The second reason I laughed was that this is the whole point!
It's the paradox of life: that only by living--head first, soaking up experience without knowing any better, making stupid mistakes, treating time like there are free refills, being forced to awkwardly move closer to yourself after far too much trial and error, naively rushing head-on when better judgment would urge the opposite, just as we should, just as it must be--do we gain the wisdom we wish we'd only had sooner.
To add to the humor, this dynamic is perpetually true. I can only imagine Rod Stewart's amusement when at 58, he recorded his version of the song to pay tribute to bandmate and original vocalist Ronnie Wood, who was 26 when he first recorded the song: "When you were younger?"
It is perhaps a rule of life that we think ourselves to only now have all the answers. We've all talked to the guy who thinks he's the teacher and has barely begun the lesson. Many such cases. I've been that guy.
It's all relative. Lately, I've begun to wonder if I know less today than ever before. I definitely know more about how very much I don't know. And that keeps expanding.
Years ago, a friend offered the advice that you should check in on yourself every so often and ask if you're embarrassed at how naive you were since the previous check-in (say 6 or 12 months). It doesn't have to (and probably shouldn't) measure every aspect of life at once, but if you don't feel it in any regard, you're not growing.
As frustrating as it can be, I aim to consistently feel that I am gaining knowledge or wisdom that I could have so desperately used a little earlier. Better now than later, or than never.
The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago...