Our Fleeting Youth

The experience of looking in the mirror and wondering where all the time went and who we’ve become is an uncanny yet not uncommon emotion. To go home for a break and see a little sibling all of a sudden as tall as you are, to find the kitchen has acquired a new frying pan, to see boxes left behind in a childhood room--all of these unexpected encounters evoke some twisted combination of nostalgia and fear of missing out. All of these changes would be typically meaningless and may have even gone unnoticed if you were present through all the minuscule renovations; however, a feeling more complicated and reflective occurs inside oneself when sentiments of discomforting foreignness manifest in a place that is ordinarily familiar.

We’ve seen it depicted in countless coming-of-age films and young adult novels, and we’ve even felt it reach us through the likes of poets such as Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. Coming of age today means growing into as well as growing out of ourselves. It’s the transformation of the sum of our past through the unpredictability of our future. Whitman’s poem, “There Was a Child Went Forth” lays down this uncomfortable yet necessary tug of losing and gaining and relearning what makes up our very essence.

“There was a child went forth every day,

And the first object he look'd upon, that object he became,

And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part of the day,

Or for many years or stretching cycles of years.”

As we go forth in these critical years, ever-changing and moving in often cyclical patterns, we tend to forget and let go of certain pieces of our youth. We leave home and arrive at a new and different place to call home. Objects and people that were once a part of us now learn to grow without us, and we share exclamations at some once-in-a-while get together that sound like this: “I can’t believe how old you’ve gotten!”; “She’s getting married already?”; “Oh, how time flies!”

Oftentimes when we have these reflective conversations and moments they are accompanied by feelings of melancholy and wishes to grasp onto the tenderness and familiarity of the past. Perhaps the greatest lesson we can learn from artists that focus on these sentiments such as Whitman and Dickinson and Linklater and Salinger is that we should do our best to escape the fear of their inevitability, and rather, we should embrace the ephemeral nature of life as a sign of vitality and self-actualization. Instead of focusing on the transitory and unstable side of our relationships to ourselves and to one another, these artists beg of us to see the light in the temporality of living and the promise it brings for us to flourish beyond our childhood state. When we look in the mirror and reflect on what is looking back at us, our emotions challenge us to see a person we haven’t met before and welcome them brightly.