Once in a while I’m frustrated talking to a young adult, newly hatched from years in a classroom and taking their first steps into the world of career and family. I slip the name of a celebrity into the conversation, perhaps I recall a famous slogan from a political campaign or even refer to a cultural happening from a few years back.
In return, I receive a blank and puzzled stare.
Many of my memories are of events that happened before these young adults were even born. We are both looking back at the years we have seen, but my gaze reaches much further than theirs.
These days my backward gaze often occurs in generational leaps of twenty or twenty-five years. Two hops back and I’m a young adult myself, barely out of college, settling into a world where almost everyone else is older than me. When that barely twenty year old me, observing the world from the vantage of youth, saw the aged, did he understand that one day he too would be sporting gray, even white hair? Or was this realization pushed aside as he said to himself, “I’ll never be one of them.”
And did he realize that one day many years in the future, he would sit across a table from a person in their mid-twenties and wonder, “Where did all the years go?”
I have been at both ends of adulthood, young and now old. As I look back I find myself adding and subtracting in blocks of 25, doing my sums as I did when I was a child in school, but now with big chunks of my life instead of meaningless numbers scratched in chalk on a classroom blackboard.
Playing this game of generational arithmetic can lead to sobering reflection on our existence, about how long it has lasted, and about the fact that we are now on the downhill side of our time here on earth. All of this strikes deeply into our sense of who we are, of who we have been, and of what we have made of ourselves in the long stretch of years we have lived.
Inevitably an awareness, perhaps even a fear, of our own mortality rises to the surface of our mind.
My first moment of fear, even terror, came eight or nine years ago one night as I lay in bed, my eyes shut, hoping I would soon drift into sleep. Suddenly I felt myself racing straight downhill on skis, at an ever-accelerating speed. This was not a dream or even a vision. Instead it was a whole body experience, with all my senses sharpened as I hurtled madly down the steep mountain. What was I flying toward? What lay at the bottom of that steep slope? After a second or two I was once again lying in bed, the fear and terror gone, never to return.
Is it mere psychology that has kept the terror at bay? Is it only our human habit of averting our eyes from the fears lurking in the darkness around us? No, there is more. My later embrace of Christianity and its promise of eternal life can only have strengthened my defenses. Although thoughts of mortality have visited me since, nothing as terrifying as that downhill race has made it through again.
The young, most of them at least, know nothing of these fears and anxieties. They stand on the threshold of adulthood, gazing ahead at … what? When I try to remember what it was like at that age, looking toward the future, I find myself standing on the edge of a precipice and seeing before me a great void. In the years since, that void has been filled not only with the events of my own life, but with the events that have shaped the world I live in.
Today the future stands before the young, waiting for them to step forward into the yawning emptiness, to receive whatever hope, faith, luck, belief, and effort will deliver to them. In a couple decades, past the sell-by date for the world I have known, the world they are building will have taken form, shaped by their experiences, beliefs, and values.
This struggle between the young, shaping the world anew, and the old, holding onto the world they have known, is always with us. Like two teams engaged in an athletic contest, each generation occupies one end of the field. The old bring their years of experience to the contest, while the young bring their greater energy, their hope for the future and a conviction that they have all the time in the world.
But there is one other difference. The young have yet to learn what the old already know – that eventually everyone gets to play at both ends of the field
