Getting Old, Pearl Jam style

I’ve been thinking a lot about getting older as of late, and find myself more and more looking forward to the process. I’ve finally integrated some solid practices into my life, and already feel them softening me up a bit. Additionally, while life doesn’t seem to be getting any easier with age, dealing with it does seem to be. Things still hurt just as bad as they used to, but it feels like I’m able to let go of that pain just a little easier than before. It’s a shift of frame really, just holding things a bit more lightly, with just a bit less attachment. I think it might get easier with age because one has a lot more experiences to compare each moment to. It’s like when you’re a kid and one summer feels like an entire lifetime, whereas with age one summer feels like a blink of an eye. Relatively speaking, each summer has more context than the last so it doesn’t seem quite as epic as it used to. In film/video/editing terms, it’s liking zooming out on an editing time line, every clip or event still occupies the same amount of time, but takes up less space to make room for everything else.

Similarly, as I age I find that most pain I feel, whether emotional, spiritual, or physical, is one that I’ve experienced in some degree or another in the past, which makes it a lot easier to not make a big deal about it. Wounds just start taking up less space on the time line as the years go by.

I think the best way to make sense of my above incoherent ramblings might be for me to try to express them in another way, and one I know very well: Pearl Jam. So check it out, I think these two songs are very similar, and about very similar experiences. However, I think there’s one key difference between them that ends up making them so remarkably different. Call it wisdom, call it age, call it softness, call it non-attachment, call it whatever you want really. In any case, I’m looking forward to more of it. Cheers.

Pearl Jam – Ten – Black – 1991

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Pearl Jam – Pearl Jam – Come Back – 2006