I find myself missing the '90s lately. Maybe that is just my mid-40s talking, but with the recent '90s revival in fashion and other things, it seems like my teenage years are all around me. Except not really. Context is everything.
It's not that I miss that period of time historically or that I'm nostalgic for it. I don't think it was simpler, it was just less fractured at a cultural level. (I certainly don't miss my personal fashion sense of those years...oy. I was not a cool teenager. I'm not a cool adult either, but let's just leave it there, hmm?) I am enjoying my Doc Marten combat boots a great deal these days, however. One of the perks of being an adult is being able to afford some of the things you couldn't as a teenager.
It's more that I miss having common cultural touchstones. GenX is the lost generation, if you ask me. Everyone skips over us and goes straight from Boomers to Millennials. Particularly those of us born in the late 1970s; the Oregon Trail mini-generation if you will. I guess I get tired of that sometimes. I want to be able to reference Pearl Jam, Third Eye Blind, the Goo-Goo Dolls, Dave Matthews Band, Hootie and the Blowfish, Collective Soul, Lilith Faire, Reality Bites, Life Goes On, Felicity, Saved by the Bell, CK One, coffee house culture, VHS and 8-track players, mix-tapes, and the pre-internet/cell phone days and not be met with blank incomprehension. Last fall, we had my husband's clerks over for a game night and played Apples to Apples. Admittedly, our copy is about 15 years old, but I was surprised how many of the Zoomer clerks didn't get the pop culture references. Demi Moore, people. Michelle Pfieffer. Sharon Stone. And I'm not even particularly well-versed in pop culture. I felt very old in that moment.
We are the generation who had an analog childhood and acquired a digital adulthood; we straddle the life worlds of Boomers and Millennials. And now in our 40s and 50s, we are raising children and taking care of our aging Boomer or Great Depression parents. Or grieving them when they are gone. It's a busy season of life, a necessary one, a good one, but largely invisible.
I read Andrew Rannells' two books this past week; he is exactly the same age as me and grew up in the Midwest. So much of the culture and touch points of his coming of age are familiar to me. (Fair warning, his stories are very funny and enjoyable to me as a creative person who likes to perform, but his books are definitely not for everyone). I felt the same kinship to Mary Harringon while reading her excellent book. She is also exactly the same age as me and the context of her early adulthood is familiar in the same ways.
One of the essays toward the end of Rannells' second book asks the question of how you mark time as an adult, particularly if you don't have kids. That is to say, how do you know you are an adult if you don't have the so-called traditional markers of it? It's an interesting question, marking time. Our liturgical calendar and rhythms of family life are definitely the scaffolding for me, but I'm thinking more about internal markers.
I sometimes wish I could go back and enjoy my early 20s more. I was in such a hurry to be settled and socially awkward and insecure. I'm still socially awkward but I'm working on it. I felt a lot of pressure to be a responsible adult, to be financially independent and follow a quick narrow path to maturity. It's been 20 years this year since I moved back to the States from Russia. I don't regret the move there and sometimes wonder what might have been if I'd just taken the dead-end job I was offered after my original job ended and stayed longer.
It is a dangerous slippery slope to play the what-if game, particularly in your 40s. The major decisions of life are made, the path is relatively set. Until it isn't. If there is one thing characteristic of our current moment it is the basic instability of absolutely everything. Liquid modernity writ large.
Except that actually, my 40s are pretty great. There's a certain sort of je ne sais quoi about this period of life, a kind of settledness within myself that I lacked at earlier ages (and wish I had had!) I'm less afraid of things, more secure in myself, and find my horizons are much broader than they were previously. The world simply is, and people simply are. It is the way of things. I'm tired of the us/them binary of so much public discourse, of the constant scare-mongering and catastrophizing. We are all people just struggling through life. Our most important job is to love one another.
For all that I am an historian and love to think about the past, I have always been someone thinking four steps ahead, often to my own detriment. My recent reading of Charles Taylor's A Secular Age has given me some pause about that tendency. It is a peculiarly modern thing to do--to push ahead with no regard for the present. I suppose it is of a piece with trying to be anything other than what we actually are. The conclusion I keep coming to is that we cannot go back.
Taylor observes that attempts to recreate the past in the present are doomed to failure because they take something that developed organically and creatively and mechanize it, stealing the life from it (747). We can never go back to a unified societal vision because once you introduce choice into a system, the mere presence of an option fragilizes those choices. We are all Cartesian Protestants now.
At the same time, however, we can anchor our place in the world by reenacting the patterns of life passed on to our by our ancestors. These reenactments bring both the people who have gone before us and the patterns they enacted closer to us, gathering time, as it were (719). The idea of gathered time (a pre-modern concept) is very interesting to me, as it tracks with my theory of Orthodox time and the idea of God existing in an Eternal NOW. To this theory I would add the image of the world's time as gathered in the way that fabric is gathered. Dips and folds bring the pieces closer together, but also fan out below to allow movement. The gathering can be relaxed or tightened, depending on the need.
Taylor goes on to note that our restless search for meaning and mythos is part of the human condition and that to try to subvert that restlessness will only set us back and ultimately cause more suffering. To live in the discomfort is actually part of human flourishing (622). We must learn to hold the ambiguity of life within ourselves and understand that the tension will never be resolved, but that we can hold it lightly. That meaning exists in the world beyond our minds and selves and is there to be found if we care to look for it.
I suppose the back and forth of life is part of holding that tension within oneself. I don't *really* want to go back to my early 20s, even if I could. There is so much that has been hard won along the way. In the meantime, I'll be listening to The Bridge by Red Hot Chili Peppers, Crash by Dave Matthews Band, and Iris by the Goo Goo Dolls whilst stomping around in my combat boots. I'm sure I've still got a black ribbon choker around here somewhere...if you know, you know.
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Cited:
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age. Boston: Harvard University Press, 2007.
