Let’s go ahead and assume that the topics we tend to worry about are actually social constructs. Let’s also go ahead and assume that much of what’s presented as fact actually originated long ago in someone else’s agenda or biases, in order to instill fear, control and/or to make money. And then let’s recognize that the things we go on to believe anyway are the worst things, because isn’t that just human nature to bow to our lesser angels?
It isn’t exactly news that American girls and women are trained to monitor and parse our deficits, to continuously narrate our decline, and to begin bemoaning how our best years are behind us, even when we are young. But if you look at the numbers and also pretend you’re a man, it doesn’t even make practical sense. A few years to be new, a few years to be a little kid, a few years to be a tween, a few years to be a teenager, ten years to be young, ten years to be under 40 and then … that’s it? I hate that math. That math sucks.
We don’t fall out of life 15 years after our brains have finished forming. But this is the construct we’re accepting when we piss and moan about getting older. This is the construct we accept when we refer to 40 as “old.” And this is also the construct we accept when we use “young” as shorthand for good, relevant, interesting and “old” as shorthand for bad, irrelevant, over.
I, like you possibly, get pretty tired of hollow rah-rah middle age you-go-girl stuff. This is not that, I hope. Recently I found myself practically surrounded by women fully in their age of mastery. Mastery isn’t a vibe or a catchy t-shirt, it’s a demonstration, an example. These women are all over 40, one who is 70. Maybe mastery is simply the gift we receive for never fully accepting the constructs we’re handed.
The mastery I’m talking about is not perfection, which is of course impossible, but rather the coming together of skills, experience, temperament, perspective, and curiosity. It’s the loss of a fear of failure (or success for that matter), and it’s the earned resiliency of being kicked around by life, fielding rejection and disappointment, and knowing you can pick yourself back up and learn from it and get better — just watch me, we say like the 9-year-olds we used to be, jumping our bikes over dirt hills or racing each other to made-up finish lines, just watch me go ahead and do it.
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