Aging
Recontextualizing experience as we age
aging•/ˈājiNG/• noun
: the process of growing old
Have you ever looked back at old photographs and suddenly recalled that moment? The feeling, the mood, the subtle cue you missed when first experiencing it. You might feel joy or remorse, but those hazy memories suddenly get their second chance.
Fill in the blanks
The magic of human memory is how faulty and unreliable it is, how it keeps forgetting the unwanted and highlights the desirable. While our memory of moments descends, our understanding of the world ascends.
Some memories of things, people, or moments become significant as we age. This re-connection we build through memories evolves the relationship. We fill in the blanks, recontextualize those moments, and prescribe meaning to things that may not have had meaning before. We started to read between the lines, empathize and develop a better understanding of what was going on. The minuscule detail, like an obsession with Tai chi, self-help meditation books, and a disingenuous smile, finally become noteworthy.
Split Realities
You can live wherever you want to live. Be whoever you want to be. You have time.
- Calum
For young teenagers, aging is like opening a new book chapter. Birthdays are so exciting; we can’t wait to see what life has to offer; it’s the beginning of something big. In contrast, at some point in life, aging can become a scary thing. As Queen and David Bowie said:
It’s the terror of knowing what this world is about,
Watching some good friends screamin’, “Let me out”
Pray tomorrow gets me higher, high, high.
Pressure on people, people on streets.
Turned away from it all like a blind man.
Sat on a fence, but it don’t work;
Keep coming up with love, but it’s so slashed and torn.
Birthdays become a deadline; it feels like we’re running out of time, approaching a dead end. It highlights how even though we’re together underneath the same sky, our experience of the world can be vastly different, separated by the “number” we call age.
Being in Someone Else’s Shoe
If my life were a book, this phase would be called: Empathize. Growing up, I have a quite bitter view of the world, blaming people’s inability to gather relevant information and make the right decision as the most significant cause of my suffering, without caring about their rationale.
As life went on, I developed a more genuine interest in understanding why people do what they do and feel what they feel. Like Sophie trying to understand why Callum teaches her self-defense, why he lets her be whoever she wants to be, and how he struggles to prevent his intergenerational trauma from being passed down unconsciously to her. The thing she only understands when she’s his age after experiencing everything.
Aftersun(2022) painfully portrays that every subtle gesture is a manifestation of something complex underneath. It’s not always an over-the-top emotion or dramatic sequence. It’s in the simple things, an overly too-long sleep, inappropriate choice of words, or an uneasy goodbye wave.
’Cause love’s such an old-fashioned word
And love dares you to care for
The people on the edge of the night
And love dares you to change our way of
Caring about ourselves- Under Pressure by Queen and David Bowie
