The Final Encore of Adolescence

It’s a funny age—the age I am. Or perhaps it’s just that I’m a funny sort of man.

It’s a funny time at least, with everything paused, and possibly with good reason. It feels like taking a deep breath ready for the next rest of your life. Old hobbies are colliding with new hobbies, and with meeting people and lifestyles far removed from anything as quaint as a hobby. New friends collide with old friends, and sometimes they cancel each other out. That said, sometimes the new friends can help bring the older ones back close again. There’s a need to consume newspapers, books, television, film and music like some kind of second education. Other people’s lives become more interesting too, and trying to imagine living those lives is like trying on clothes in a shop where you like everything.

This funny time brings a renewed interest in old books, old haunts, old pubs and new pints. At the moment the one or two pints that accompany a conversation are the nicest they’ve ever been. Comedy is funnier, thoughtful films suddenly merit tears, and underneath the histrionics is a sense of learning how to move on from it all. The funny time brings a new haircut with a pleasant, blend-in anonymity when you want it. It also pushes history hard in your face, and greenery suddenly becomes more important to look at and walk through.

There is an ideal serenity to this funny age, and with no sense of it being wrong, or of it taking you in the wrong direction. There is no sense of it being particularly right, either, but rather that those polarised descriptions are wrong themselves. Barring lost weekends, your life and your brain are like the black box on a plane recording everything. Writing can really show how everything counts like that; how wasted time from about five years ago can have actually compiled thoughts in your head that will do something for you some day. It all comes back in some form.

People will generally say that your future lies in the particular skill that they know you for. There is only one person who really knows though, but for a while even they will forget it with this funny age relaxing them. With egalitarian options that could let you recklessly sign up for anything you happen to think of, this current pause is remedial. It says: let it all sink in, everything in you and everything in the world, all of it. Have faith in what you are good at…that particular thing that feels completely different to anything else in your life.

Perhaps it’s just a funny mood: wanderlust from watching DVDs again. A well-made film can inspire the best in the people watching it. Though if a film offers a revelation of your own destiny you should remember how carefully planned and filmed the message of that screen success story was.

If the post-movie feeling only lasts a few hours, this funny age is doing something more lifelong. It is acknowledging the final encore of adolescence perhaps, if we want something titular, or maybe it’s just setting you up with the best ideas you’ve got to go on with.