Friday, January 30, 2009

Sorry, coming through, but I'm going to draft-dodge time if that's alright with you...
I don't intend for this to be viewed as an insubordination of sort, or even as a rejection of a system that I don't think makes much sense. Rather, I see it as a sensible adoption of a metric that is more adaptive for us in the long run.
If we continue to use time, well then, we all get old. Our number gets bigger, whether we like it or not. And does anyone want to be "old?" The connotations aren't pretty. We can escape, though, by dodging time just as Bill Clinton dodged the draft: we simply don't have to participate if we don't want.
There are other association metrics besides time that are inaccurate in other ways, which constrict our open minds, conflate unrelated issues, and produce judgment errors about what people should or should not be. For example, the Zac Brown band acknowledges one such oversight in their Chicken Fried lyrics: "There's no dollar sign on a piece of mind." You can't buy serenity: that you must earn with a different currency. Also, people assume there's some relationship between weight and happiness. For those who think being skinny is a unique predictor of happiness (in regression statistics, the equivalent of producing a significant squared semi-partial correlation), then please talk to all those unfortunate anorexic girls and ask them how much they get satisfaction out of a good meal with friends... So why do we allow time to dictate our perspective? The guys in Rent had it right when they asked:

"How do you measure, measure a year?
In Daylights, in sunsets, in midnights
In cups of coffee
In inches, in miles, in laughter, in strife.

In five hundred twenty-five thousand
Six hundred minutes
How do you measure
A year in the life?

How about love?
"


And just as money and weight are fallible prophets of contentment and happiness, respectively, so too is time a poor predictor for the "age" of a state of mind. I've been called "a baby" and "ma'am" within 24 hours of each other; the evaluations coming from a man 30 years my senior and a girl who has been around ten years fewer than I have; apparently they could not agree on how "old" I was. So instead of letting them duke it out, I think I'll negotiate my age and not worry about either label. I'll try to avoid labeling "older" or "younger" altogether, because I think there is even an age associated with labeling (and it's old age). You can only label something when you think you've got it figured out. In contrast, I plan to stay in an apprentice mindset- taking on new things and adjusting my thinking as the terrain changes. That mindset allows you to call something what it is- an approach I'd argue is more adaptive than assuming certain qualities or amount of knowledge accrued based on objective age. Plus, I'm pretty sure that an "apprentice" is associated with youth. So I'll stick with that. And being excused from the parameters of time additionally allows for us to be "opposite" things at the same time. Because I think dodging time is a pretty wise move...and yet I'm young.
But now I can be both.

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