OLD AND YOUNG

Looking through a friend’s old photograph album, my friend stopped at a picture of a young woman in a colourful jacket looking sideways at the camera - attractive, wistful. “Who’s that?” I said. “Well, it’s either you or your daughter and, as it’s 1985, I guess it’s you.” Shocked and mesmerised, I peered more closely at this stranger in clothes I’m convinced I’ve never bought. “Where?” I said, trying to orientate myself. “Camp”, he said. Oh yes. I continued to scrutinise the picture, trying to link my current self to this unknown one, before he turned the page and left me stranded.

This recent event made me think about the difficulty of connecting to my younger self. It is usually only possible through a song, a meetup with an old friend, a diary entry: tiny echoes of a life once lived. That young woman in the photo couldn’t possibly have discerned what she would become now, another 37 years on, any more than I can really inhabit the body and mind of the young woman I was back then. Strange to know that we are one and the same person, separated so completely by time and evolution.

I look back on that young woman now with a mixture of longing and pity, seeing a half-formed me trying to fit in with the demands of a society I didn’t understand and only partly respected, whilst simultaneously baulking at it all and thinking I could change things. At 37 I probably thought I understood a lot - at least more than a decade or two previously - but you can’t really know what you haven’t yet lived. I didn’t know that life’s learnings would have to be realised over and over again, each time with greater awareness but often with the same chagrin of Oh No Not This Again. That is not to say that at 74+ years I have some sense of completion, but the inner work feels different - to reconcile my mistakes, omissions and mishaps so as to fade out without resentment, and to know that the work will, as always, be left unfinished.

The photograph also made me think about relating to today’s 37 year olds (and by ‘37’ I actually mean anyone under 50). I can see that they are as unsure of themselves as I was then, though they do a better job of hiding it. Privileged to be in their company, I might offer a torch to show the way (if asked), some reassurance to alleviate suffering (if needed), or simply the kind of listening that says “I’m here for you always” - but we both know that my life is not the life that they will live. And then it is gone, that small interlude where old meets young. Mostly we are going on separate tracks, and feel like curious but sympathetic strangers traversing the same land.

And then there are the differences. Younger people seem to talk more quickly than I can keep up with. Did they always seem more beautiful, more liberated, less mannered, less educated? My parents would certainly have thought that about us, the generation who grew up in the 1960s. We were outlandishly dressed, disrespectful, ignorant of our history in comparison to the War generation, intent on changing their patriarchal and puritanical attitudes rather than empathising with their stoicism and steadfastness. I’m generalising here, but I suspect today’s 37 year olds want to ditch our generation’s habits and values just as firmly as we rejected those that came before. Is there always a mix of envy and admiration when old meets young, both ways? Perhaps it is nature’s way of ensuring that the old die off gladly, and the young are happy to push them off.

Yet I confess… I would sometimes like a young person to take me under their wing, help me with the new skills of the digital age, do something I can’t do for myself any more, teach me about their very different lives. But it feels like asking a big favour of beautiful but different beings looking elsewhere for their interest and engagement.