Category: Getting Older
“Ohmigosh I think I’m going to have a breakdown.”
“You’ll be fine.”
“No, I won’t. I’m old now.”
“Old?! You’re only 25!”
“Right! I’m 25! Tweeenty-fiiive! I’ve lived a quarter of a century now, and it’s all downhill from here.”
My friends and I are hitting (or have hit) mid-mid-life. Quarter-Life.
(Well, technically, Quarter-Life would be something like 20 if the average life expectancy is 80, right? But 25 is such a nice round number.)
What exactly happens at Quarter-Life?
Wild keg parties turn into sophisticated cocktail parties. Insurance and 401K plans start to become important. And your single friends begin to drop like flies into the fires of—gulp—marriage.
Yup. The dreaded M word. The word that’s claimed many a good man, snaring him away from bars and strip clubs, never to be heard from again.
“We lost another one,” is the sad lament us guys mutter to one another every time we hear of another buddy blowing the standard two-to-three months salary on a rock.
Then comes the sad realization that the Best Years of your life, a.k.a. College, are long gone.
Sure, you can try to recapture them with a night of binge drinking before you hit the clubs. But then you see a sea of Britney Spears-look-alikes and you seriously wonder if it’s legal to stare at their tight bottoms like that.
And you can’t help but feel your age when you’re amidst such a sea of young blood. It’s as if there’s been a changing of the guard and the new ranks have moved in.
Then you find yourself seeking out the older clubs, the ones that occasionally play 80’s music, and you feel better.
For some, this may seem depressing.
But me, I’m gonna hold out as long as I can. I ain’t gonna let Quarter-Life get me down, dammit, even if I’m 26 now as I write this.
“You’re only as old as you think you are.”
Now that’s a saying that I really like. Age is relative; it’s all in your mind. I can shake this Quarter-Life thing. Mind over matter, mind over matter.
Then again, I just went to my first cocktail party this weekend and have been throwing money into 401Ks for the last few years.
Drat. So maybe Quarter-Life IS rearing its ugly head in my face already. Dammit. I’m old now. I’m going to stop writing this now and go have a breakdown.
. . .
Have you had a quarter-life breakdown?
With true friends, there are no “Goodbyes,” only “See you laters.”
Standing in a tight stairway at a friend’s house during our farewell party, I said those lines as tears brimmed and sobs choked the air.
It was the end of our senior college year. One buddy was returning to Hong Kong. Three were off to Medical school. One to Law school. Another to the business world. And I was jumping into the web design field.
Some let go their damns of grief. It was a passionate and fervent moment. They cried in each other’s arms. In warm embrace, we all wept and lamented the closing of a chapter of our lives.
I didn’t cry though. Though I knew this was a farewell party, I knew it wasn’t a true farewell. Deep in my heart, I knew I would see them again. For better or for worse. We would all meet up again someday.
Because with true friends, there are no “Goodbyes,” only “See you laters.”
. . .
Ever have to say goodbye to good friends?
I see life as a series of paths before me. Like branches of a tree they stretch out in random directions, each with it’s own branch children and grandchildren.
The path I take becomes my life, my collection of experiences. Each path leads me to a difference set of branches, from which comes another set of random branches.
These branches are the choices in my life. Just as I am faced with hundreds of choices each day, I am standing on a path with hundreds of branches.
During a conversation on fate and destiny, a friend expressed the viewpoint that fate is the string of branches that have been predetermined for any given person—a Yellow Brick Road, so to speak. Destiny would then be the final destination at the very end of the Yellow Brick Road.
With that definition, I’d say I don’t believe in fate and destiny. I don’t believe that there is a predetermined set of paths that one takes.
In my opinion, each person makes his own road. As the person comes across each branch, that person alone decides which branch to take. Everyone controls his own fate and destiny.
I see this Yellow Brick Road theory as a romantic but limiting one. To believe that I have been preordained to do whatever I am doing at this very moment (to believe that you were fated to be reading this) is, in my opinion, a leap of faith for reasons of fear and want of reassurance.
To know that what a person’s actions have already been determined provides a sense of validation to his everyday actions. If he controlled his own fate, then he would be directly responsible for each and every one of his actions.
So I can see why it’s comforting to believe in the Yellow Brick Road theory. That person can make a grand mistake, and he is not directly responsible for it.
If that person is content with what he’s currently doing, then he’s less apt to change it—he’ll believe that that is what he’s been fated to do. There’s no true incentive to go the extra level and make himself even more content.
If one does not believe in fate, however, then he may take that extra risk with the realization that he’s the master of his own fate and destiny. The only way to truly be happy and successful would be to make himself happy and successful, not to sit back and wait until fate brings him there.
For me, it comes down to: If I was standing on a path with hundred branches, I’d rather see a field of paths ahead of me than one Yellow Brick Road that I have to take without question or choice.
. . .
Do you believe in fate?
I want to be cremated.
When I die, I mean.
There’s only so much space on this Earth, and the population is growing exponentially everyday. Sooner or later, there’s going to be a bottleneck.
And I don’t want them digging up my bones to relieve that bottleneck.
There have already been incidents where entire graveyards have been moved in order to make more space for the living. Not to mention the sickos that desecrate graves for their own perverted pleasures.
Uh uh. No thanks. I don’t want that happening to me. Not that I believe that my dead body is anything special. But just the thought that somebody would be using my fibulas for drumsticks irks me.
Plus, if you cremate me, then that’s one extra space for someone else. (Ain’t I just so darn considerate?)
Just scatter my ashes in the sea. That’s all I ask. It’s the most literal interpretation of “earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”
There’s kind of a romantic notion to having my ashes scattered in sea as well. Every time my descendants look at a sunset over the ocean, hopefully they’ll remember me.
They can even toss flowers into the sea if they really want to. I’ll just have to think of a good body of water to be my final resting place.
And to top it off, cremation is cheaper than buying a grave site, tombstone, and coffin too.
(Ain’t I just the nicest?)
. . .
How do you want to be laid to rest?
