A Resolution for the Year #4

by Chad Fujihara

My New Year's Resolution: I will write something every single day and post it for everyone to see.

#4: You're older now than you've ever been before and only getting older

As a society we seem to place a lot of value on the amount of time we've been on this rock in the middle of pan-galactic nowhere. We shoot from the hip based on the perceived age of those we have to deal with in tertiary manners. And yet, past a point it doesn't make that big of a difference whether one person is one more step closer to the age of Methuselah than another.



Developmentally we treat children in a way that we feel is conducive to them eventually learning to operate as adults. To one extreme there is coddling which can result in a child becoming so codependent on those who take care of them that the only change between infancy and adulthood is their physical size. The other extreme is to unfairly treat children like adults without any leeway for the fact that they don't yet have all the necessary references that are acquired over time.

I try to be even when I deal with people, whatever age they happen to appear. At work, my co-workers are given to calling folks "sir" or "ma'am" even if that person may not be more than a year or two removed from their own tally of time. I just talk to people like I would anyone else, with very little pretense.

Actually trying to figure out the age of someone nowadays is made no easier by the effect that our modern diets have had on the growing body. There are grade-schoolers walking around in the bodies of teenagers and teenagers walking around in the bodies of full-grown adults. To paraphrase Chris Rock, "If she looks eighteen, she'll probably get you in jail."

I like to think about the alien race that Kurt Vonnegut created and featured in his novel "Slaughter House Five." Similar to Dr. Manhattan from "The Watchmen" they see all moments in time at once. People to them look like infinite-legged centipedes coiling around themselves and one another. They don't feel much in the way of remorse when someone dies because they are still living in all the moments prior to that one unfortunate one. The concept might seem daunting, just like omnipotence which I've discussed elsewhen, but I figure you could probably not go insane if you just learn to focus on the moments that you need to. Then again, most humans don't really need help focusing on specific moments; humans need some help learning how to look at everything else around those exact points in time.