Acceleration

There are phases in everyone's life when change comes fast. Spurts of months as kids, days as infants, but it doesn't stop. My mother went from a kind of eternal middle-age to elderly in the span of six months.

These last four years have left their mark on me, changing my view of myself. For long years, I felt no different at 27 than at any other age. Today, I feel older than that. I know that I think differently, and see the world from a different angle, than I could in my twenties. Not better, not wiser necessarily, but differently. I feel I have also lost a certain kind of mental freshness, knowledge skips me past improbable possibilities.

I know that a six year old can see what I no longer can, physically. More, because they lack any filters. But I see more because I know what to look for, how to interpret and recall. I have learned how to see and listen, but this blinds and deafens me to sound and sights that I have learned are usually unimportant.

I can't hear a lot of new music, because it all seems such a re-hash. But then, I've always had to search for music I liked, and can no longer settle for, nay tolerate, oversold pop. Movies pall, because they are remakes, or telling the old stories - perhaps as well, but not better, and I've seen them. I'm choosier, not because everything today is crap, but because I've seen all that crap before. Adolescent struggles with acceptance and vanity don't speak to my main concerns.

Nor does gross-out humor affect me. After all, I've cleaned poo, while telling my patient not to worry, this is what I do, no big deal. Or cheered on farting after a colonoscopy, straight faced, encouraging. I tell the incontinent not to be embarrassed, not in front of me, I clean up far worse. And women coming for surgery that starting their period at this moment is apparently mandatory - since it happens so often. And I will be mopping up later. Helps to really not mind, not to be grossed out at all. Guts the humor of a fart joke.

This from a kid who couldn't stand to clean out the soaked oatmeal pan without retching.

I listen to younger folks, and older ones, to keep my peripheral vision. But it really is comforting to talk with others who can see the world from this midrange, where the changes are constant, but subtle, hard to see or describe to those starting out or ending up in the swirling edges.

Every change of direction is an acceleration.