Who Are We Now and What Did We Really Know?

To say that existential questions plague me sounds a bit dramatic but honestly, they really do.  This is an essay I wrote back in 2008 and never published on my blog.  Life got too busy and complicated.  So many years later I've realized that many of the same questions still persist and might always persist.  Here is what I was thinking then and what I am thinking about now.

Who am I now and what did I really know then?  That is a question that pops into my mind more and more often as I grow older.  I suppose it's not a mystery why.  I'm nearly forty and I am about to have my second child.  I remember when forty seemed ancient and it scares me now that I am about to be what I once considered ancient and I am about to have a child at that "ancient" age!  I think that part of the trouble is that I never even imagined what forty would look like, myself at forty, my life at forty, my house, my car, my children...MY children.  It seems that I've been rushing to get older all of my life and now I'm swimming up stream to get back!

I once told my husband during an argument that when I was young I really did know more than I do now.  He laughed the laugh of the wiser spouse and said that must know more now if I am able to look back and understand myself as a teenager.   I said, "It wasn't so much 'understanding' as 'relating'. "  The two are actually different.  "Understanding" implies that I am at a higher consciousness, or knowledge level than I once was and sometimes, I'm not so sure.  Bob (my husband) said that my life and understanding of it was less complicated than it is now.  "You mean like a mortgage, a family to take care of, an irritatingly logical husband?"  But these are grown up issues.

My teenage life was so much less complicated.  My father had just died.  I moved schools twice that year after having grown up with the same people in the same school for most of my life.  My extended family became the dance company I was a part of, "mothered" by an emotionally desolate artistic director who neither wanted to be a mother nor an artistic director.  For to understand and lead your children you have to care about their hearts and minds, not just rehearsing 24/7.  In other words, I was over booked and exhausted - confused about the "why" in life and angry about the "what".

All of us, somewhere in us must have some sort of compass that tells us where we are now and where we've been.  I think this is supposed to help us understand ourselves better.  I am an almost middle aged house wife but my story really started a long time ago when I knew something.

Things I knew in high school:

1.  Endless possibilities surrounded me wherever I went.  I could do anything (except math).  The world called me on - I just had to answer.
2.  Adults did NOT know everything!
3.  World peace was possible and inevitable.
4.  Life should be fun.

I lived in my own world of youth and meaningfulness.  Is it naive to believe these things?  Songs like "Hey Jude", "All You Need Is Love", "Let It Be" and most importantly "Imagine" spoke to me then and are relevant even now, twenty five years later.

If disillusionment is a sign of intellectual maturity then I must be eighty.  I listened and learned from the adults in my life that rebellion was a natural outgrowth of youth and that little by little I would put aside my amusing wonderings and submit to the rigors of adulthood.  I heard this from my artistic director, who, in between the verbal humiliation, from time to time would offer the sage advice that life, i.e. the world of ballet, meant "work, work, work" and not as I seemed to think, "fun", and from my uncle, who upon my high school graduation soberly reported to me that those were the best years of my life.

Yet as we get older what have we really learned?

I learned to let go of what I knew and hold on to different intangibles - a good job, a government which is accountable to its citizens, parents (my husband and me) having all the answers, living the American Dream...yet I am just as uncertain about these things as I was certain about the others.

We've all seen, especially in recent times how unstable the principles we were taught actually are.  More starkly than in the sixties and seventies when the Beatles wrote those songs, jobs are lost on the whim of a bureaucrat, a CEO, a politician.  Government officials have not been held accountable for huge mistakes and errors in judgement, even criminal acts.  Let us remember NAFTA (the multitude of politicians telling us the average American doesn't understand the global economy).  Apparently, the average politician didn't understand the American economy.   The poor response to Katrina, the recent Wall Street bail out, the Iraq War - are these examples of wisdom and maturity?  I don't know about anyone else but I can "imagine all the people living life as one".  It's better than two wars, a staggering debt and having to explain to my daughter how we let this happen.

I can say now as an almost ancient forty year old woman that I wished I had believed in myself more.  I didn't lack courage.  I lacked conviction.  The world pushed me around and I nudged it back.  Now I know it's true that adults don't know everything because I am one, and I've relearned from my five year old daughter that life really should be more about having fun and less about the day to day distractions.  As for world peace?  We can all still dream and elect people who dream like us.  As for me, I'm hoping that who I am now gets better and what I really know becomes more.