A Theory of 30

Today's post will be vaguely mathematical.

Spring rain was drizzling down upon us yesterday, as it is today.   I had been sitting at the table for awhile sending e-mails, writing down scraps of stories as they drifted into my head.

I decided I was thirsty and stood up to get some water.  In standing up my temperamental knees gave me a sharp, decisive jolt.  Probably to remind me who was boss.

My knees weren't always this uncooperative.  25 years ago they only hurt if I fell upon them in some violent fashion.  But then I became a teacher of tiny humans which meant I spent a lot of time sitting cross-legged on the floor.

Unbeknownst to me at the time, this is a bad thing to do to grown-up knees.  Sit cross-legged I mean.

Now I have knees that can sense a change in the weather and that complain at random times.


But here's the gist of this post:  I don't feel inside like I should be at the point where I have temperamental knees.

Inside I don't feel like I am 49 years old.   Inside where I really live I feel like I range in age from 15 to maybe 21.  Inside I flutter from whiny negativity and self-doubt to blazing confidence and back again, neither extreme seeming particularly where I should be at the age of 49.

So this is how my brain arranged this realization:


49=15


Then I thought back a few years and tried to remember how my insides felt then.


My brain drew up a helpful table:


30 = 27
35 = 24
40 = 21
45 = 18
50 = 15
55 = 12
60+ = 9

This made sense to me.   I think 30 is the turnaround year.   A lot of people spend their 29th year trying to squeeze as much out of their waning 20's as possible while trying to push that 30 as far away as possible.  But 365 days is still 365 days no matter how hard we might wish time would slow down or speed up. So we turn 30 and start making that slow mental u-turn.

I'm not saying we regress  in any way as we make this u-turn.  We don't lose anything--except maybe our inhibitions as the gap widens between our aging bodies and our rejuvenating inner eye.  This is a u-turn of our inner relationship with the outer world.  How we see ourselves and other people and events and places.   How our insecurities and confidence in ourselves changes.

It's an imperceptible shift.  I certainly didn't see it coming until I was already far into it.


And while I'm not in a big hurry to stand witness as my own gap between chronology and inner self widens, I think there are worse things than to eventually approach the world through the cosmic, questioning eyes of a 9 or 10 year old.

Even if it does mean that I have achy knees.