Nobody Knows Sh!t
Birthday Musings and a Break from LA
It sounds dim, but sometimes life feels like a series of disillusionments. Most of us are fortunate enough to have been born into a great mythos: these people who call themselves our parents use myth to protect us from all the dark things that may arrive at our door. Wolves, germs, guns, broccoli, or Yankee fans. And because these people charged with rearing you have no idea what they’re doing, they continue to add fuel to the myths that protect us. Santa Claus is there to make you good, the Tooth Fairy is there to make you brave, and the Easter Bunny is just there because nobody had the heart to tell the Italian kids they just ate his cousin.
Imagine your parents. Looking at you with a loving gaze as you sat in the corner, picking your nose, eating glue, and discovering your private parts, but somehow, your parents still had hope. So they lied to you. They told you that you could be anything you wanted to be. They never bothered with a nuanced conversation with five-year-old you, trying to explain that while anything was possible, most things are not probable, particularly if you engage in none of the things required to become a rock star, professional surfer, or President of these United States.
Soon, however, our innocence is lost when we catch our parents taking our Redline Chrome BMX Racer out of the box, and we finally realize that Donner never carried anything, but a part of us always remains steeped in the mythology of childhood.
We go on to become lawyers, thieves, or bankers, while we hang on to some little piece of Walter Mitty, singing in our cars like Tom Petty, hacking up the muni like Tiger, or writing drivel online, like a frustrated Hemingway. Along the way, hopefully, we get good at our jobs, better at our lives, and find contentment in doing good things, being good people, and rising to our responsibilities.
Because myths are the most powerful human invention, our childhood myths are woven into us at a cellular level. If you grew up surrounded by wise older people, or at least older people who seemed wise because they were old, you assumed it would happen to you someday.
Yet every milestone birthday brings a great disappointment when we wake up and realize that we aren’t any smarter than we were the day before. The gray has come along with the girth, our crow’s feet have spread their wings, but where is the wisdom we were promised on the front porches of our childhood?
Maybe the great secret of life is that nobody knows shit.
That’s not to say that there is no wisdom in experience, or that we can’t learn from history. I am a sucker for the kind of articles that detail all the things the writer has learned, particularly those by an octogenarian. But this pervasive idea that at some age we will have it all figured out is just another myth up there with the man in the moon.
Nobody knows shit, at any age. Not professors or podcasters, not politicians or your parents. There are no ten rules for this, or five laws of that; in the end there is only you, and your acceptance of life’s one great truth that once you figure it out, everything will change again.
This should not be a revelation for a man closing out his sixth decade, yet here we are. I can look back at my life’s progression and see that I knew everything in my teens, realized that I might not know everything in my forties, and am accepting that I really don’t know anything in my fifties.
As I turn 55 this week, I hope the secret to aging is to accept that I know less than I ever have, but with more confidence. Because that’s where I am.
xAP
Perfection! 👏 Happy Birthday!
Happy Birthday Ante!