Aging Mindfully

Reporting in as a “milestone” on the path to growing up, since this blog has become my “field notes” for the transition from childhood to adulthood (the kind that my future kids will assume I have popped out of the womb being). I got shaken awake by a garbage truck on Monday morning at 5am (Midtown East is really loud with those streetfacing windows on garbage mornings), so I let a number of anxieties get me out of bed at 5:30 — clearing fridge space for Thanksgiving, buying food, what to make, cleaning the bathroom, trying to throw away cluttered things again.

Anyway, spent a long time catching up with Harvey (among a few friends) and struggled to put into words something I’ve been feeling recently — rigidity of the mind and my opinions, and hesitation/mixed feelings about that stubbornness. Like the Slate article that mentioned that we are nostalgic for the music of our youth due to how our tastes and preferences are wired, I’ve noticed recently that I have some backlash on new trends in culture, fashion, music, and technologies that leave me feeling bewildered, like some sort of forty-something mom.

Some of those things are obstinate opinions formed in youth that have been difficult to shake — music tastes, mostly — and some are more from habit (hard to switch to Snapchat over Facebook, strangely). I went to a few concerts over the summer where I was being mushed around with high schoolers, less than a decade different from me but already a world apart in habits and preferences. I only wonder what it will be like for younger folks.

This conversation with Harvey, who is ever-wise, surfaced a “tick” in the path to adulthood that I never realized. In my life now, friends are shifting about, making career moves, geographic moves, and taking various steps with their relationships (or not-relationships), but all this is what I expected: shifting social circles and social habits. But I never expected to hit a stubbornness and unreceptiveness in my tastes to modern trends. My initial impulse to a lot of new culture wasn’t one of “let me evaluate this at face value”, but more like, “This doesn’t sound like the stuff I like, how come that hasn’t been around for a decade?” That kind of thought escalates year on year, decade on decade — “When I was your age, music was really music”, or “We never used this weird newfangled technology, we sat down and wrote proper emails to each other” (not really). As young people now, we never expect to be the ones caught unaware with new changes. We’re the “technological” millenials, after all. But at some point, our minds slow in their receptiveness to change, and our opinions are biased by the mental heuristics formed after 2-3 solid decades of relative life success. (“If it worked up till now, it must be right.”) Going forward, keeping an open mind and assessing everything at face value, and trying to keep up with the times, will take a little bit more mental effort and a little more open-mindedness.

That, and general mindfulness, is positioning itself very well to be my main focus for 2015. That, and focus.