A Short Time as an Adult

At some point in the last few months I realized, regardless of my opinions on the matter, I am an adult. I’m still not totally sure what that means. I don’t think it means I’m eighteen or twenty-one years old, as the law says. At least I’m not sure what was so different about me when I was seventeen or twenty. I’ve never really liked applying labels like “adult” to myself. It is obvious to anyone that we evolve over time as individuals, but it is difficult to say precisely when we move from one species of individual to the next. And exactly what species should we be aiming for, and how should we get there?

Several years ago I was a part of a ragtag sailing militia (affectionately) referred to as the “North Cheever Yacht Club”. The circumstances of me joining and the many experiences there are too complicated and too many to express here but, suffice to say, I was eighteen or an adult, so they say, at the time. It was a funny experience to me because I was probably the most immature member by at least thirty years. In any case, it was a welcoming community and sailing became an oasis I needed at the time.

One of the interesting memories I recall from this period was during a birthday celebration for one of our sailors who was turning eighty-two or three. A more calm and rejuvinating party than the trap-houses I’d been attending at the time, there was a lot of opportunity for normal conversation so I struck one up with the man of the night. After some birthday wishes and pleasantry I said to him, “I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, but I am eighteen years old, and to be frank, I just could not imagine what it must feel like to be eighty-two… So, what does it feel like?”

In retrospect I see how a question like this could be misconstrued as offensive, but I was being completely sincere.

“Well”, he said, “when I was your age, if someone were to tell me what I am about to tell you, I would neither have understood nor have believed them.” He then said:

You see, the thing is, I am old. When I stop and think, I know it’s true, because I’ve been here for eighty damn years. But I just don’t know how the hell I got here. When I was your age, I am certain that, if I would have looked at me now I just woudln’t have been able to connect it. The thing that just wouldn’t have made sense is that I am still me. When I was a kid in kindergarten, that was me. When I moved out and went to study at university, that was me. When I started working and paying bills, when I got married, while I raised kids, and when I retired, that was me. And here I am, the same person, in the same body, only eighty-years old, that started kindergarten seventy-five years ago. I don’t know if that makes any sense at all, but that’s about the best answer I can give.

I thanked him. I’m still not sure if I get it yet but I feel like I will one day.

We spend a lot of time defining ourselves, to both ourselves and to others. I claim to myself and to others that I am a “software-engineer”, a “lithuanian-polynesian”, a “New Yorker”, a “sailor”. From my own observation it seems clear that this is a shortcut to circumvent actually learning about and defining yourself. There are many groups of people, large and small, whom I share some experience or bond with but it is important to me to think that these attributes are a part of me, rather than I am a part of them. As a software-engineer and sailor I think it is preferrable to design in terms of deeper interfaces: I am stil me.