How you end up yearning for what you used to shun

If you're paying attention as you age, it becomes increasingly easy to notice how ironic things can turn out to be. Whether you've noticed how much like your own parent(s) you've become, or how so many apparently good intentions backfire, or to what extent the thing you've tried hardest to avoid has become the determining factor in your life, it is one of life's mysteries that irony is inevitable, should you live long enough.

I, for instance, have been sort of "Greenpeace" since before Greenpeace was founded. I loved being in trees when I was a kid and haven't changed much. So it was ironic for me to find myself not only with a son-in-law logger, but surrounded by all his faller friends.

Much to my amazement, I've never yet met a logger who did not love the forest. I asked once what went through his head when he looked at a beautiful forest, and knew he was going to clearcut destroy it. He shrugged, smiled and made no attempt to answer. Clearly, he loved the forest, and loved to log it, much the same way I suppose, that some hunters love the wild animals they kill.

Much the same way I love animals and eat meat.…

On another note, some time ago I also noticed how easy it is, in the process of trying to be a friend to your child, to make a monstrous enemy of him/her instead. Obsessive attempts by an adult to indulge a child do not produce a happy pal. Rather, they are more likely to produce an unhappy tyrant.

Life is full of such things. You end up with exactly the thing you thought you were avoiding or preventing.

But on a lighter note, it is also possible to discover that the thing you tried so hard to get away from is actually nice to find again. This happens all the time too. Otherwise, what would explain the popularity of high-school reunions? Or second marriages?

In my case, I fled the doors of high school at the earliest possible moment, sure I'd never come back. I was certain that no one with a pulse or working mind would willingly stay in high school any longer than they absolutely had to. Given time, I ended up a teacher, and eventually developed warm-fuzzy feelings about my old school and classmates as well.

And now, in my advancing, plodding age, I'd welcome with open arms people who in my leaping, twitchy youth I had nothing much to do with. Go figure.

As for second marriages, well, I haven't direct experience, only observations. Some of these matches turn out much better than first marriages, and some others are unhappy disasters. Fixating on another human being and committing to a marriage is much like playing Deal or No Deal. On some level, no matter what you feel or think you know about the other person, it could be pure, dumb luck whether you find a treasure or a big fat deficit once the case is opened. This is not news.

But what is interesting is how many people eventually yearn for exactly the things they ran from earlier in life.

So here we are, having lived long enough to see how the wheel turns, how we can come full circle, when we thought we were on a straight line, not some great arcing curve.

Children typically chafe under the expectation that they could or should turn out like their parent(s). When we are young, we want to bust out of the parameters of our upbringing. We want to find new country, chart new courses. It is the normal quest of the young, who more often see their elders as closed off from the great expanse of possibility, and stuck in some narrow corner out of the past. We all do this (or perhaps we should).

But then we age. We end up seeing life through a maze of disappointments, disasters, experiences and surprises we had no clue about earlier. Our perspective and therefore our perceptions change.

If in some quiet moment you have thought fondly about the old town, or the old school or the old beliefs that you couldn't wait to get away from, if what seemed stifling and dull when you were young now seems rich with meaning or character, if what used to seem backward now seems better, then you may have discovered you are walking in a circle.

It's like that old cliché: the older you get, the smarter you realize your parents are/were. Or as Joni Mitchell once sang: "You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone." Or as Shakespeare observed more than once about lifecycles: "At first the infant, mewling and puking in the nurse's arms …" to the "last scene of all … second childishness, and mere oblivion, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans every thing."

At some point, having been around the block more than once (been there, done that, etcetera), we are more inclined to notice that "freedom" might enslave you, riches might render you "poor," you might be lonelier in a crowd than when you're alone and, worst of all), the slower you get, the more time speeds up.…

Unless we're really paying no attention to anything as we grow older, we will find irony in many things. It's one of those mysteries.

Letters

Oh, come now, Mary-Ellen Lang, writing like an old foggie at the young age of 58! I have a couple of years on you and also find irony - in your case that in this time where people like us are looking at another 30 or likely 40 more years, given the trends, you should be coming on like someone in the 1950's your age, who really was looking at the last 10 or 20 years of their life.

We boomers can hardly start screaming 'ageism' if we start indulging in this kind of reverse ageist stuff. We have as many years likely ahead of us than many new-borns in Africa and parts of Asia do.

As a teacher you are around young people all the time. I suggest you and those like you start paying attention to, and develop an appreciation of, new music, art, literature film and ideas and start living in the present. You are only reinforcing weary stereotypes of age by becoming just like your parents!

– David Goodfellow | Ottawa