Q

i’m amused at how world-weary i assumed myself to be at 23. in my early 20s, or even my teens, there was such a firm confidence in my maturity. i felt old. i felt like i’d experienced all that life could offer. i felt blasé.

at 31 i think of myself mostly a child. just yesterday i fell while trying to tightrope walk on a tree root. just last week i felt inchoate, dwarfed by the presence of nature vast and ancient as i’ve never encountered.

how was i so certain – about myself, my thoughts, and the end of novelty – when i had yet to have a snowflake melt on my palm?

yet there is no condescension when i face my age-young self. i was, perhaps, truly old in some ways. in relation too, in context of. i admire my earnest commitment to beliefs i had no way of verifying. today i am fenced by the sole certainty that an absolute truth is often out of reach, or perhaps requires far more courage and effort than the lethargy of my intellectual cowardice can rattle into being.

that aside,

my modest little epiphany is that feeling your age has nothing to do with the linear progression of time and years.

i enjoy today my infant-like wonder at the world, and my hope that there is more to discover.

maybe tomorrow some of that old-young bravado will re-emerge, and i will again assert this and that, wanting a better world that i deem to have explored to its ends.