Growing Older

I’ve been thinking a lot about growing older lately.

It literally might be the most anxiety-inducing thing in my entire brain, this aging thing. I don’t do well with it. My 40s look a lot different than I thought they would when I was younger. Comparison is the thief of joy, and in this case I’m comparing my actual life to a life that never existed. It’s kind of messed up. I never said I was without neuroses.

Lately I have realized how, as years pass, things from the first half of my life feel like they aren’t even from the same life I have now…you hear people say things like “that was a lifetime ago”, and I totally get what they mean now.

All this connects with music in interesting ways. It’s been established that our brains attach to the music we hear as teenagers more strongly than anything we will ever hear as adults. But, at the same time, it’s also been discovered by science that listening to and playing music as we get older is one of the best things for our brains. But I have a feeling that many, many people have a hard time continuing to discover new music as they get older and continuing to have the same relationship with it they did when they were younger. I myself continue to listen to new music and enjoy it, but after a certain point it really has to be deliberate. The “magic” way that it found its way into my life when I was younger doesn’t work anymore; I have to deliberately look for new music that I like. I find a lot of music that I try out and quickly move on from. The new music I find that excites me is almost always not mainstream in any way; I don’t find it through radio or any other more traditional, old school channel.

Thinking about all this is good for me, because it helps me foster greater gratitude towards the people who DO listen to my music, especially the older ones. Some of them clearly go out of their way to do it, and that is amazing. I think about my friend Joanna from Austin, who is such a huge supporter of music and musicians that a bunch of Austin folks banded together and made Joanna t-shirts that say “Patron Saint of Live Music” and also are putting on a show in her honor. She doesn’t have to do all she does to support musicians, but that’s the choice she makes, and it’s inspiring and humbling.

I implore you to not let music somehow disappear from your life as you get older. Will it ever feel exactly the same as it did when you were a teenager? No. But will it ever feel BAD to be engaging and enjoying music? Probably not. It’s a low risk proposition. So take that chance. Love y’all.