A Brave New World of Accretion

Theme song: Truckin'

I understand that I don't know what it means to grow old. Still, I took one step closer to my dotage last week, when I turned a foxy 46. Not only that, but I had an epiphany. I love epiphanies!

There are some things I don't like about aging, most of which involve gravity and changing tissue elasticity, but that part, since it hasn't reached critical yet, isn't what really bothers me (though I'll admit it's starting to).

What really bothers me about growing older is nostalgia. I believe I've mentioned that among the states of being I really don't like, nostalgia ranks right around the top. What, I ask, is the point of wallowing in the past? Get over it!

First hand experience with nostalgia has humbled me. Nostalgia is spiritual lichen. Nostalgia grows, I suddenly understood, by accretion. Accretion means "the process of growth or increase, typically by the gradual accumulation of additional layers or matter." Ick!

Here's an example:

My beautiful friend Alison took me to Flora Grubb for my birthday (She also brought me chocolate, took me out to sushi, put up with my hyperactivity, forgave me for making fun of her Brit-ish accent, and cooked a vegetable side dish for 10 at my party. You should have been there. We performed (conducted?) Greco-Roman wrestling!) Anyhoo . . . . I've been wanting to go there for, maybe, 15 years. Just haven't gotten around to it.

Flora Grubb, to put this story in context, is an urban garden center tucked away in San Francisco's beautiful Bayview/Hunter's Point District. The location's not that important but, still, you need to know how I came to be looking at fancy plants. Okay, so, wandering the tastefully laid out hipster garden haven, looking at the beautiful plants, I started uncovering memories.

I remembered how I planted such and such a plant in the front yard of the home I bought with my ex-husband. I remembered a specific way in which I used to desire acquisition. I remembered hopes and dreams layered under current realities. In other words, there were layers of memory. I, at 46, cannot look at the average plant without association. I've simply been around the block and seen too many plants to face most them now, on their own terms, tabula rasa.

Here's how it is: After you hit about 40, a big chunk of your life is behind you, and less and less of your life is ahead of you. Not only that, but your short term memory starts going (sorry, but it's true) and the past becomes strangely easier to remember (even if you're kind of making stuff up, it feels really clear and strange things you had not remembered for a long time bubble up to the surface, like the time you saw the popular kid buying ice cream at Thrifty and snubbed him and that made him say "hi" to you and you were shocked because you didn't realize until then that he was human, too, and so now, whenever you see Thrifty, you think not only of him but of how Thrifty used to be different. In fact, as you age, you may find you remember three ways Thrifty used to be. One unwanted memory and three useless Thrifty iterations all stuck in your head. See where this is going?).

And here's the kicker: The memories just keep piling up like dry leaves (loose and floaty) or lichen (fixed and secure). These memories aren't what really happened; they are what you now imagine happened, all dressed up however you like to dress things up.

I suppose I could call all these acquired layers wisdom and, maybe, after I acquire a few more, I will. I'm not currently experiencing these layered memories in quite that way, however. The memories, on the contrary, feel intrusive. It's as if, as I age, my interior world is imposing itself on the world around me. I sometimes feel like shaking my head to clear it, like when you realize you've had a little too much to drink and wish you hadn't.

On the other hand, it's kind of exciting. If I relax into it, the whole thing is slightly hallucinogenic, but free, legal, and with no discernable health effects. On the other hand, I've got baggage. Accretion. I am no longer seeing things with a fresh point of view. Much of what I see has layers of memory and meaning attached.

The question is, given all that accretion, can I keep my sense of wonder?

My answer is to keep meditating and buckle up for the (hopefully) long, strange trip it's going to be.