My heart has grown a thousand times in size over the years and I’m only just recently realizing how great - albeit slow -that progression has been. Maybe this feeling is what’s thought of as wisdom that “comes with age.”
Implicit in this statement, though, is advanced age. Yet with each passing day everyone ages and, therefore we all acquire wisdom that comes with age.
Here, though I’m not speaking of the “bees, while pretty, hurt when they sting so they’re best left alone” sort of wisdom. Or (my favorite) “Stay out of the bushes where poison ivy might grow, especially if you’re wearing shorts.”
That one carries a special lesson for me and, if I knew you better I’d share. But, like wisdom that comes with age I’ve learned not to share that story with just anyone.
While all that is technically wisdom that comes with age, here I actually am referring to the sort that comes with advanced age.
For a long, long time I fought the awful feeling that came with people referring to me as “Sir.” If the saying that “you’re only as old as you feel” is true then hearing someone, anyone calling me “Sir” left me feeling ancient.
Never mind the fact that I, on the other hand, constantly began to get the impression that suddenly almost everyone I’d once considered “adults” or “mature” or simply “older” now looked like children to me.
Parents, politicians and policemen, pilots and priests, professors and presidential primary contenders. They all looked too young to be doing whatever it was they did and now they had the audacity to call me “Sir?”
What the hell happened? Why didn’t I see this coming? And, most important to me “If everyone who calls me “Sir” looks this young to me then how damned old must I look to the world?” Of course this isn’t a question I can answer myself.
So lately, if I find myself in the midst of a bout of insecurity I may come right out and ask a trusted person “Do I look old to you?” Not that I expect them to say “Hell, yes, you sure do!” Instead, they placate me and say wonderful things such as “Why, no, you look great!”
That willingness to not so much lie but to stretch the truth in my favor is how I define a “trusted person” today.
But Bessel van der Kolk, author of The Body Keeps the Score, a text about how a person’s psychological history can be interpreted by observing their physical condition over a lifetime would have a field day with me.
My arms and legs are covered with scars, some of them quite recent. Walking through the house in the dark, en route to the bathroom at 3 a.m. qualifies as activity that carries a strong potential for physical injury So does stepping out into the snow in flip-flops to pick up after Sophie. Good thing I love her so much.
Anyway, the world’s best tightrope walker would be hard pressed to avoid tripping over all the obstacles in my home, including Sophie and her vast selection of toys. Again, it’s a good thing I love her so much.
Sadly, I don’t always succeed in avoiding squashing Sophie’s paws or her tail, so it’s a good thing she loves me muchly, too.
The bottom line is that I’m so chronically off-balance from being overweight and under-exercised that I must concede that van der Kolk is right; I’m no longer at home inside my own body.
It’s to the point where I’ve embraced occasional trips to Walmart without feeling self-conscious.
There, I’m surrounded by others who are also out of touch with their own bodies and unhappy in their own skin.
This sounds terrible I know, but I believe that most Walmart customers are mental and physical duds. So I admit that, in going there I feel better about myself because at least I’m not one of them. Well I hope I’m not.
But back in my bicycle racing and triathlon days I was probably no less condescending. It’s just that I’d take my superior attitude to a Whole Foods or GNC store. In fact, I’d basically walk around everywhere with my game face on. I’ve always held dear my physical appearance and well-being, even to the point of arrogance.
It speaks volumes about me and my sense of place in the world, and why I have trouble believing that anyone would think of me as “Sir.” While I never did like to be called “dude” or “bud,” I realize now it’s preferable to “Sir.”
It’s probably not a surprise then that part of what hid the creeping burden of age - or allowed me to ignore it - was cloaked in the views of my old bicycle racing teammates, all of whom are within five to ten years my own age.
If I thought the term “dude” really had no place in spoken English amongst young guys then I felt even more so about middle-aged guys using that term. Of course they compounded that feeling by following it up with that curious, nonverbal display of machismo, the fist-bump.
Who the hell thought this stuff up? And where the hell was I when it was happening? I was probably alone on my time trial bike on some lonely country road in the middle of nowhere, lost in contemplation and drowned in meditation.
Still, I rightly considered myself an athlete and a sports fan, just not of the NBA, NFL, MLB or MLS variety. But I could have told you who the top multisport athletes were and what I imagined those fit women to be like in bed.
Like I said, I trained on lonely roads and such thoughts kept my mind occupied. It sure beat the hell out of watching some high-paid, sweaty jocks fist-bumping each other in the end zone.
The first time one of my bike teammates called me “dude” was a shock, to the point where whatever he was saying was lost on me.
My head was suddenly flooded with a thousand thoughts, like “I hope he’s not talking to me,” and “I wonder where he picked that up-maybe he thinks using his kid’s terms makes him seem the ‘cool dad.’” Who knows?
What was infinitely worse for me was the realization that, for me to respond to “dude” was to make me complicit with what I saw as his odd use of an Old West cowboy term, as in Dude Ranch. Hell, I’d rather be called “cowboy.”
I was a grown man wearing colorful, tight short pants that matched a dozen other men on overpriced bicycles. To the untrained eye, we were a bunch of pretty boys. We nanced around in cleated cycling shoes not meant for walking and were somewhat snotty about it, too. It wouldn’t have surprised me to know that bystanders might see us as prepping for a gay pride celebration.
And though we were proud we were not gay (or at least the gay alter egos among us were not visible) and I guess that’s where the fist-bumping and use of the word “dude” came in.
Though those things were probably intended to offset the apparent, inherent gay-ness in an otherwise macho, mano-a-mano sport actually made things more effeminate.
But I think my teammates would agree with me that the real measure of manhood is a willingness to accept anyone, regardless of sexual or religious or political preference or any other differences relative to their own.
Now that’s what I think of as wisdom that comes with age, likely to be a fine influence on the younger, impetuous dudes on the team.
And in keeping with that idea of tolerance for others I eventually got used to hearing the term “dude” among my counterparts, though I could never bring myself to use the term. Nobody ever judged me for it, if they noticed at all.
As a time trial specialist used to racing alone on the course and against the clock, not elbow to elbow against other dudes, the demanding mental aspects of the discipline dominated.
There was never any room for doubt and thinking of yourself in the most absolutely powerful terms was encouraged and accepted. Perhaps it’s a big part of my grocery store arrogance, I don’t know.
But, as long as it never hurt anyone it was innocent enough, and I terribly miss that sense of overconfidence, for it drove me in a way I’ve not known since my bicycle accident with a car in 2012.
Despite the crash, though, the reality of age was the wolf lurking at the door and, no matter how many times a grown man says “dude” that reality must eventually assert itself. And that’s the difference between my old teammates and I.
Chances are, many of them no longer race, choosing instead to bask in the glow of grandfatherhood or just past glories.
Some still might invest the time and energy in training and prepping for weekend events as they always have.
These, I think, are probably the sprinters and the multi sport athletes on the team. The sprinters, with their slight, sleek physiques will always excel at cycling and are justifiably unwilling to give up the sport without a fight.
One of my team’s strongest sprinters was hands down the heaviest user of the term “dude.” He was a great team leader and a guy who clearly asserted his leadership upon every teammate. But the effects of time on our bodies sooner or later asserts itself; no one gets out alive.
This whole process of aging is an insidious one, I think because it takes so many forms over the years. As kids, our age is fairly easy to interpret because our bodies grow so quickly, often too quick for our brains to keep up. As such, we don’t notice the wisdom that comes with youth.
Just becoming aware that you are regularly outgrowing your shoes or shirts or undershorts is not, in itself, wisdom. That’s why we might still trip over our untied shoelaces, or have a favorite baseball glove that is clearly too small for my hand, like my blue one.
It’s presence in my thoughts is validation enough that, yes, I was young once and that chance to recount some of my past allows me to finally gain some of the wisdom that was always there, waiting to be discovered.
The saying that “The wisdom of youth is wasted on the young” may be true. But, to an older man-like me-who’s willing to review some of his youth through more mature lenses, that wisdom is not lost.
Having that sense of past is like having pieces of a puzzle come together more completely than ever imaginable. But once that puzzle becomes more complete, past occurrences take on greater meaning and relevance to me.
Hence, I get more of the “older person’s” version of the “wisdom that comes with age” reference. It’s as if I’m living the polar opposite of my childhood mental and physical development.
That is, except perhaps for my waistline my body has long since stopped growing. Not long ago my shirts and my pants fit tightly because of the muscle mass I’d developed over a lifetime of physical activity and active endurance training.
My brain, however now provides me with interesting new contexts for some long-held perspectives I once took for gospel. I believe everyone’s brain has this ability if a person can, or is committed, to appreciate it.
In my view, “old” movies and stories and past interactions take on more meaning. Those changes tend to be negligible, which is exactly what makes the really profound changes more noteworthy.
In a sense, wisdom can be considered the sum total of our learning from our cumulative life lessons. But it’s only of value to us if we can recognize it for what it is.
Frankly, the How is not as important as the When, and the sooner we can glean a little wisdom out of our lives the sooner we can also share it with others.
Wisdom that is left unshared with others is of little value to the world, even if it’s only reinforcement of an idea that was revealed long ago. After all, the things we do today, right or wrong, will validate how and what we’ve done in the past.
It’s a prime reason that I rarely go back to read any of my old writing from the handful of memory sticks it’s been saved on.
But that would take months of self-indulgent reading and undoubtedly editing stories about cycling or work or other things that occurred in another life.
Leaving those words behind and looking ahead, it seems, is the wisest thing to do. So count me in, dude.
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