9 February 2023
(I was sitting in the pub when I began to pen this:)
“Shit, I don’t know. Am I still a ‘young man’ at 30? Or am I just ‘some guy.’ I’m not sure. Well, here are the thoughts of some guy:”
(I then proceeded to write nothing else that afternoon.")
13 February 2023
Okay, now that I’ve spent a few days away from the event and replaced the whiskey with morning coffee, I feel (somewhat) more prepared to reflect on the nature of my “quarter-life crisis.” It is, after all, the tradition of this blog to post around this time of year—perhaps just once for the calendar year.
I am now, as I have been for some time, concerned with ‘identity.’ And more so, I feel consumed by the idea of ‘legacy.’ Though times have changed much since my father’s time, I continue to wonder how the saw the world when he was 30, in 1947.
Many of my peers (and potential readers) and colleagues had grandparents and great-somethings-or-other alive in the interwar period, but hell, my father was 28 when the War ended… I should have had this identity crisis back when I was 28. In some ways, I did.
At 28, I was in the final and fifth year of my doctoral program, and I earned my master’s in passing at the end of year 5—only—due to my excessive burnout, and prolonged, what everyone else is calling ‘trauma.’ Still, I am (today) making my intent clear with myself to finish my degree, though many folks have told me “once [I] leave, [I] won’t come back.” And, some part of myself believes that. It’s certainly not an endeavor I plan on rushing in to … twice. I used to (often) say I’d be on the tenure track before 30. And I am not. Though, many—nearly all—of my friends in the program were older than I was, And, if I have any of my father’s spirit or vigor, I don’t see “early retirement” in my future. There will be plenty of time to work and teach. And for the time being, I am at least someplace where I can continue to work with students and feel valued and supported by my organization.
And I don’t have to grade.
But the world was different in 1947. And likewise, it will be different when my children are 30 (2060+ if I’m being ambitious). The fact that the world will look so vastly different for them is almost mundane, if not obviously mundane. Change happens, though I think people tend to underestimate how quickly the world turns.
I don’t know if this perspective comes from my father or from my thinking about the idea of my father, but when your dad is born before the end of the Great War, fights in the Second, and sees it end at 28 to keep fighting and teaching until 2015, you tend to see a few things. I want to share those ideas here, if only for safekeeping:
Firstly, time—and more so our understanding of time—is fragile.
Most people, especially most people my age, do not realize this—I argue. My grandfather was contemporary to the typewriter and lived to see the first flight of the Wright brothers. My father was already (or perhaps “only”) 52 when we landed on the moon. So to excuse an expletive, time fucking flies by. We need to be more perceptive of that.
Everything is impermanent.
This is more of a platitude at this point: “nothing lasts forever.” But to take that in a literal sense is kind of revealing and relieving. Things do not persist through time. Sure, maybe at a geological scale, but in human scale—the frame of reference we have—pain, sorrow, heartbreak, joy, all of it lasts, but nothing lasts forever.
Respect is not earned, it is given, and then sometimes if it is aptly placed, it is earned.
This one is tricky, but I feel that we often heard (in my generation) things like “you have to earn my respect” or something of the sort. That is, as my father would say, “hogwash.” We give respect to people all the time who don’t show up for us. We place respect as a standard and then people measure up or they don’t. Basic respect is a baseline—a privilege of living in society—and an expectation. We give that to everyone, then sometimes, people lose that privilege through their actions or lack of action.
We make time for the things and people we care about. Having “no time” is a value indicator.
I harp on about this one a lot. And it both feels self-evident yet also deserving of more interrogation on its own.
Not everyone’s values cohere. Not everyone’s values are worth your time.
People care about different things. That’s fine. And a lot of the time people care about things you don’t care about. Related to #4, we don’t make time for those people.
Trust your “gut” if it is well trained.
An addendum to #6: Train your “gut” so that your impulse is good.
“Laugh less and smile more.”
When I—perhaps impetuously—asked my father if he had any “final advice” on his deathbed while he was still coherent, he said this to me. It is only now beginning to make sense, and I do not think it is good advice to give everyone, but it was good advice for me at the time. I think it has to do with not needing to always be heard or be vocal about everything, but that internal happiness is enough. Happiness is something that is private, and can be shared, but ultimately resides within us. Where there is a time and a place to do so, we do not need to share everything which is private.
These are the thoughts I had in the last week which pulled me away from the idea that I had done “nothing” with my life until now. Now is a new chapter of an existing story. One in my family that goes back generations—at least two generations—to 1867, and to be fair, the cultural knowledge we hold goes back even further than my grandfather and his family. Where I did not get to meet the man from the nineteenth century, I got to know the man from the twentieth, and I get to be the man from the twenty-first.