I'm So Much Younger Now

Crimson flames tied through my ears
Rollin' high and mighty traps
Pounced with fire on flaming roads
Using ideas as my maps
"We'll meet on edges, soon," said I
Proud 'neath heated brow.
Ah, but I was so much older then,
I'm younger than that now.
~ Bob Dylan

I didn’t smile a lot when I was in my youth. I was usually serious and task oriented. So much so that Mike, a friend of my college years, called me “the Old Man.”

I can’t tell you why I was “old beyond my years.” Perhaps it was the oldest child syndrome, or the clinical depression that has plagued me since adolescence. Or, maybe, Vietnam (where I expected to go and die) or the peace protests or the alternate life styles being lived in the '60s, of which I was on the fringe but never in the mainstream. Or, perhaps, feeling a need to save the oppressed—actually the world—I found no space in my life for laugher or joy, things my relatives called “silliness.”

Yeah, even then I had a weird sense of satirical, maybe cynical, humor. But that wit only came out when I was with close and trusted friends. And even then I acted older than my age: an “old man” at twenty.

Now, at 61, I am an old man, but not nearly as old as I was at 20. Somewhere in the trek between then and now, I began to take life less seriously. Perhaps I took Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer to heart, even before I had heard it. Possibly I realized the absurdity underlying all human events. Maybe I began to realize that laugher could heal more broken hearts that somberness. Or, perchance, I just grew up.

I don’t have an answer. And, I’m in no mood to analyze how I became who I am. That examination of my life seems too serious a project, with dubious results.

So, today I am younger than I was 40+ years ago. I realize that life is to be enjoyed. Perhaps that’s the message of the bubbling Buddha and the laughing Jesus:

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