The faces of these young people, especially those who were military men, bore that expression of condescending respect for their elders which seems to say to the older generation, “We are prepared to respect and honor you, but all the same remember that the future belongs to us.” — Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
March is a double-birthday month in our household: my birthday and my son’s are exactly a week apart. This year, my son turned 19, making him about the age of the young officers Tolstoy was writing about. We were able to have a low-key birthday celebration last weekend when he was home from college for spring break with a few friends. I’m happy to report that, in spite of what Tolstoy suggested, I detected zero expressions of “condescending respect” from the younger crowd. However, I suspect this is because no nineteen-year-old really understands the future. I know at that age, I didn’t. An advantage of keeping a journal since high school is I can periodically dip back into the mind of my younger self. (To be honest, this is neither something I do often nor something I recommend!) This birthday month, I reread the pages I wrote when I turned 19. Two things jumped out at me:
- I was about to go to a cousin’s wedding. Since she’s close to my age, I wrote: “I feel like I’m getting old.” At nineteen.
- I wrote how I just couldn’t understand how people around my parent’s ages did the same thing, day after day and year after year. To me, that monotony would mean that I was no longer growing, and with teenage confidence I wrote: “That’s how I know it’s time to die.”
Now that I’m 51, my life is made up of cycles that repeat on a daily and yearly basis, which would apparently mortify my nineteen-year-old self. For instance, it’s now springtime. That means it’s time for a visit to the UW Quad to see the cherry blossoms. In summer I enjoy Seattle’s reliable clear skies and late lingering light. In fall I anticipate the Northwest’s inevitable and sudden change from “cool and crisp” to “damp and mushroomy.” The long nights of winter give me more time to appreciate my nocturnal neighbors. I get a jolt of excitement every time I hear the barred owls or coyotes in the nearby swamp. Eventually, the yellow witch hazel and the red flowering current announce that the cycle is about to begin again.
I’ve learned I’m happier when I’m regularly spending time outside, and I’ve created a yearly cycle for that, too. Spring and summer are for long bike rides, fall and winter are for running. Making this seasonal keeps me from getting bored. I’ve built another repetitious ritual inside this yearly cycle. I try to run 1 or 2 half-marathons during my running season, and I’ve turned these into a barometer measuring how my life is going. If I can finish in under an hour and fifty minutes, it’s a sign my life is doing okay. It means I’ve found time to regularly get outside and run, so my life can’t be that out of control. This past December, I was so mad at myself when I finished the Seattle half-marathon in 1:54, a full seven minutes slower than the prior year. I could no longer deny it: I’d let myself slack over the fall. I’d skipped many morning runs. I earned personal redemption in the spring. The combination of more regular running through the winter and the flatter course at Lake Sammamish got me back under my benchmark time.
Here’s what I didn’t understand about repetition, ritual, and the future when I was nineteen.
It’s cliché to point out that nothing lasts forever. This year’s cherry blossoms will float away in the wind. In my neighborhood, the blushing magnolia petals are already falling and starting to turn into a slick and rotting carpet on the ground. What the cliché misses, though, is that rebirth and regeneration happen. I can count on the return of spring flowers, summer sunlight, fall mushrooms, and winter darkness. Routine and ritual are comforting celebrations of return and rebirth.
I also now know deep in my bones that the future does not belong to my son or to me or to the youthful officers, long ago buried, that Tolstoy wrote about in War and Peace. The future belongs to the dead; the living must content themselves with the present. My nineteen-year-old self thought that being married is what made someone old? I will be old when my inevitable decline means I can no longer enjoy what’s great in this world. Hopefully that comes long after age robs me of 1:50 half-marathon times, and until then, I will run (and bike, and read, and write) to prove to myself that old hasn’t happened yet.