All Things have their Season

There is a beauty in the young man’s impetuosity that the old man can no longer afford. It does not mean the old man has grown wiser — it means the ground has shifted under him, and what was appropriate to one terrain is not appropriate to another. The young man who leaps without looking is charming, because his leaping suggests a surplus of energy and a confidence in his own resilience. The old man who leaps without looking is merely imprudent. The same act, in different seasons, has entirely different meanings.

We recognize this about physical things. No one expects an old tree to put out the supple green shoots of spring, and we do not call it a failure for having thickened bark and slower growth. But with human virtues and vices and pleasures, we are less clear about what is seasonable. We praise the old man who maintains the passionate opinions of his youth, as if persistence were itself a virtue. Sometimes it is. More often it is simply an inability to acknowledge that time has moved, that the world has altered, and that he himself has altered with it whether he will or no.

“It is not just the body that changes — the soul, too, has its seasons; and the man who cannot feel them changing is not holding firm to himself but merely failing to keep up.”

The question I put to myself as I grow older is not whether I have changed — I have, unmistakably — but whether the changes are those that time should bring or those that I should resist. There is a decay of the body that is natural and requires only acceptance. There is a decay of curiosity, of openness, of the willingness to be surprised, that is not natural — it is a choice, or the accumulated result of many small choices, each of which was a tiny surrender.

I still want things. I still find the world interesting. I am less certain than I was at thirty that my preferences are correct, which I think is an improvement. What I have laid down are not the desires and enthusiasms of youth but the certainties — and the laying down of those, at least, seems to me the right season’s work.