"Your life is so exciting! You really should write a book." "Weren't you scared to do that all alone?" "You're driving where all by yourself? I'd be terrified!" "You worked where? Man, I've never done anything like that!"
Are these, in your opinion, questions that would be asked of, or statements that would be made to an uninteresting person? Are the comments something you might expect to ask a young adventurer? How likely are you to have these reactions to a story told by a senior citizen?
We all have preconceptions about how people in any age group act, a problem I've dealt with far too much in my own life. My family, what's left of it, act their ages (three years to six or seven years younger than I am). They are settled down, live sensible lives, don't do outrageous (for mature people) stuff and pride themselves on being pillars of their churches and their society. They are sensible. They are somewhat in a rut, from my perspective, and not quite interesting enough for me to encourage them to write their autobiographies.
They worry about me and try to explain me to their friends. I'm sure they have "What are we going to do with her?" conversations about me. Why?
I'm in the process of recovering from a recent misadventure, the first one that got me into a lot of trouble and that will take a while to recover from. I made a perfectly good decision based on the information I had at the time. Unfortunately, there was some really important information I didn't have. I'll recover. In the meantime, they continue to scold me, try to get me to act my age, and shake their heads in despair.
Me? A 67-year-old, four-times-divorced, retired female currently working hard to recover from an adventure gone wrong, while I plan my next adventure-a little more carefully than I did the last one. My mistake last time: I didn't know what I didn't know. Next time, I'll definitely do all I can to at least avoid making the same mistake again.
The comments in the opening paragraph were almost all delivered by people much younger than I am, some less than half my age. They were all trying to be safe and sensible; trying hard to act their ages and win the approval of family, friends, and co-workers. They were/are putting off what they want to do today until some day in the distant future when they can have an adventure in a safe and sensible way. The most frequent question when they found out my plans: "Are you planning to drive 2,600 miles to California all alone? Aren't you scared?" My response: "Why should I be scared? It's certainly not my first solo long-distance trip! I think it'll be a great adventure."
In my life, I have found absolutely no correlation-mathematical of otherwise-between age and "interesting-ness". I have, however, found a significant correlation between youth and inexperience, and misconceptions about other people. For all you young folks out there, you are in for a big surprise as you get older. You will find that if you're not interesting now, chances are you won't be in the future. If you have no imagination now, no passions about anything in your life (beyond so-called reality TV and a few computer games), you probably won't change much as you get older.
If, on the other hand, you're young, a bit daring, curious about your world, and passionate about learning or doing something cool, that won't change as you age either. The main advantage of getting older, if you're already interesting, is that you will care less about how others perceive your choices, your willingness to take a risk, and your ability to recover and do it again as soon as you possibly can.
What was my recent mistake? I retired from a really good job to move back to California where I was born and raised, and where I'd wanted to be for years. I went with my usual self-confidence, my good resume, a huge amount of optimism, and a great deal of excitement. My mistakes: not knowing the full story on the economic conditions at my destination; not understanding that the U.S. economy was well into what has been referred to as a downturn; and not knowing that being an educated and experienced person with gray hair would make me ineligible to obtain work. If there is a problem with getting older, it's that some of us forget that people will judge us superficially and not even find out what we want or need or can do. I learned only recently that most companies simply are not interested in hiring anybody over the age of 40, with 50 being the absolutely oldest employee they might consider in a dire emergency.
My solution (and yes, I've been planning my next adventure and escape more sensibly): I'll bide my time and build up my freelance business so I can take my job with me next time. And I will move again, as far west as I can go without risking forest fires, landslides, and years-long droughts. That eliminates California and most of the southwest. I'm thinking Wyoming.
I'll keep doing photography and digital art. I'm taking a course that will get me certified as a proofreader, so perhaps I can land a work-from-home job with a publishing company: nice steady work doing stuff I love, with enough time and freedom left over to follow my other passions.
And therein, I believe, lies the truth of the matter. Age has nothing to do with how interesting you are. What makes anyone interesting is their interests and their history. If you're not interested in or passionate about anything, you'll be pretty boring at any age. If you're mildly insane and restless, always learning something new, trying things you've never tried before, going places you've never been; if your curiosity trumps your desire to be normal in other people's eyes, no one will ever be able to say you're uninteresting. I may be 67, but I can assure you that I ain't dead yet and refuse to behave as though I am. And I bet I'll have more fun at this age than many of you will, unless you start getting interested and interesting now.
I'd like to tell you about a friend of mine, as the supreme example of the kind of spirit that truly interesting people have. He's getting close to 71 years old. He is currently finishing his last semester of college and will get his teaching credentials when he graduates. Last semester, he took his first-ever art class, and struggled with it. He wanted to draw and/or paint things that looked like what they were supposed to look like. He didn't care much for that abstract stuff. He made good progress, but wasn't really into it. This semester, he played around trying to find his style and his medium and has come up with something very creative, very unique, and very good! And it isn't photorealism. He's already gotten press coverage for it, and the semester won't be over for another three days! In an e-mail yesterday, he told me he's thinking he might work next on an M.F.A. in art.
I just hope he can find time to work with me on the book I'm ghostwriting for him, and the other one he wants to do when we finish the current one. He has a big project in the works for October (one of several that have gotten national press coverage in the past), and is occasionally M.I.A. when he goes on free Caribbean cruises as the Captain's Special Assistant, entertaining the passengers and dancing with the single women. He couldn't be boring if he wanted to! He's full of ideas, enthusiasm, and moves with lightening speed from one adventure/project/passion to the next. He simply doesn't have time to be boring. And neither do I.
How about you?