At the beginning of this month, to my astonishment, I turned 50. Here are a few things I picked on the way here:
Don’t presume there will be an endless supply of people with whom you will be close. When you’re young, you expect the years will just add new brilliant people to your life as a matter of course, and all the old ones will be preserved. Whereas if you have 2-4 people (sometimes even 1) deeply close to you at any point in your life, who really know you and have your back, consider yourself lucky.
None of the usual division metrics (ethnicity, race, political preference, post-secondary education, sexual orientation, even sex, and even income/class) matter among people as much as a certain set of existential experiences that you may have in common. Whether you’ve experienced being at your mother’s death bed or not is a thing that binds in commonness two strangers much more than where you grew up, whether you are young or old, whether you earn six figures or five. Other key experiences: whether you have children or not (though this may also be: whether you have children who live with you still: the unmarried have things in common with the empty nesters). Whether you believe that a god observes and orders human matters. Whether your society experienced war in recent memory or not.
Language and the unwritten elements of culture will be more important than you’ve expected them to be. (English gives everyone the illusion that it’s easy-going and within everyone’s grasp.)
Whereas we’d like to think that there is a clear intention, a consistent plan behind other people’s words and actions, others are not transparent to themselves. They, too, have no idea. They believe they are doing one thing and they are, IRL, doing another. Self-misunderstanding is the commonest furniture of life.