The Thing About Getting Older...
This morning as I was driving my boys to school Ollie, who turned 11 yesterday said, “The thing I hate about getting older is all the projects.” My immediate reaction was to bust out laughing. He was referring to the increasing number of school projects he’s been assigned in 5th grade in comparison to prior years, but I couldn’t help laugh at an 11-year-old opining about aging.
I spent most of this evening helping Ollie with this project which involves writing a biographical compound or complex sentence for each letter of the alphabet. He also had to include corresponding pictures. Sorting through my camera roll and correcting grammar took up nearly two hours of our evening.
Yep, the older I get the more projects I have to deal with is a truthful statement—and most of them aren’t even mine.
Middle age is the point where our plates are overflowing with projects. Kids need help with school assignments, friends hit us up for our expertise (I get resume writing requests and Jason’s always advising someone on a plumbing issue), aging parents need more assistance, work responsibilities expand and get more complex, homes and gardens need maintenance and updating, community involvement becomes more important, the list goes on and on and on…
And maybe my sense of urgency with projects I want to take on is in overdrive because it gets more and more apparent that time is finite. Nonetheless, I’ll have to disagree with Ollie. The projects are what keep me going, keep me excited to get out of bed every day. While I think Ollie is onto something, I’m going to add a bit more to his statement:
The thing I hate about getting older is I may not have time for all the projects I want to do.
Let that sink in and you’ll be in an existential tailspin in a matter of seconds. And the more I think about it, Ollie’s concern with his age speaks volumes about our youth-obsessed culture.
I guess all this means I need to find time to focus on the things I want to do while taking care of the things I need to do because who knows when I won’t be able to do anything. That’s the thing about getting older…
