Hello, audience. I've been thinking a lot lately during depressingly late nights brought on by fits of insomnia. The biggest topic of late has been getting older.
I was walking around Old Colorado City with Poncho the other day, enjoying the fresh air of a fall day in Colorado and looking at all the nifty hole-in-the-wall shops and restaurants. As we walked, we passed by some other couple who I'd never seen before and will likely never see again, and the strangest thing happened.
I have to make a quick interlude here for clarity's sake. I periodically have these moments of incredible lucidity, as if I'm seeing humanity through the eyes of a being from a higher dimension or something. This one time, it was during a commercial break, and there was some guy talking about some random thing I'd likely never buy. For the briefest second, I saw him as if I weren't a human and had never seen a human before. And I have to say guys, we look really freaking terrifying if you think about it. It's hard to see humans from an objective perspective, but for that one moment, I did. And we are ugly ugly beasties.
Anyway, I had one of those lucid moments walking by this couple. I looked the man in the eye, and I saw his face as if he were really 17 and was wearing make-up or prosthetics to make himself appear older. It was like he was wearing an age mask.
I'm coming up on my twentieth birthday here soon, and it has me thinking a lot about getting older and how we age. It's akin to that feeling you have every year on your birthday, when you think you should feel different now that you're a year older, but you never do. It just feels like another day in your life. Except that I'm about to have that feeling for the twentieth time. Two decades.
Poncho regularly remarks on how odd it is that she can remember specific events clearly up so some fifteen or sixteen years ago. I curled up in a ball and groaned about feeling old last time she mentioned anything to the effect.
I'm not a particularly astute observer, as you may or may not know. I tend to not notice things until they're right in front of my face, painted bright red and translated into layman's terms and then explained to me step by step by Mr. Rogers or Bill Nye with his cool little dinosaur explanations. I am however a highly intelligent person, and I notice things that aren't obvious without even paying them much attention.
As it is, I barely know other people exist unless I care to pay them specific attention. I don't do it on purpose, as in ignoring them intentionally. I just don't stop to consider other people unless I'm prompted to. This isn't something that everyone does, I know. There are many people that are highly conscious of other people around them all the time, and they notice a lot of things that I miss. I make sure to have at least one of those kinds of people around as often as is possible so I have a pair of eyes on my social blind spots.
So maybe I'm just slow or crazy for only just putting thoughts to this particular phenomenon, but who knows. Here goes anyway.
It's weird to think about other people from the perspective that they are also conscious, reasoning, and self-aware creatures who have lived many many years on this earth with their own experiences and interactions and relationships. I saw this couple with their age-masks, and I realized that this was another human being living life on the same planet, dealing with all the same needs as myself and having to face a lot of the same troubles I do. I realized that this man was once 19 going on 20 and seeing life with the same eyes I do now.
It's difficult for me to imagine getting older being any different because I have no idea of how life is going to change me or affect who I am now as I age. I'd like to think that I won't be too different. But then I'd just be 19-year old Mister Ludeman walking around with a 30/40/50-year old age-mask on, and that doesn't stand up in the face of logic. I may be very much the same person, but I'll undoubtedly be shaped differently due to all my time spent living in this fleshy meatsack of a body on this silly little planet in the vast expanse of our endless universe.
Do you feel old, audience? Do you look in the mirror and see yourself as the same old you, but wearing an age-mask? Or does the face in the mirror show you a different person entirely, this new creature you have become over the years, shaped by the life you've lived and the choices you've made?
