Edel Coffey: In my mind, as long as I’m alive, I’m still in my prime
I was thinking about being in your prime during a recent bout of horizontal thinking. Horizontal thinking is what I call that particular brand of self-reflection that happens when you’re lying in bed wide awake in the small hours of the morning. As a form of entertainment, my mind presents me with a carousel of topics, ranging from a quick run-down of the stupid things I said that day to the tiny amount of money left in my bank account with 17 days to go until payday.
Once those things are helpfully out of the way, my mind will then bring out the big guns, the topic designed to keep me awake until dawn starts to creep in through the curtains – the list of possible ailments that might secretly be killing me.
That RSI in my thumb from too much scrolling could actually be something more sinister; or that paper cut – could that be pulsing sepsis through my bloodstream? As I worried about being cut down in my prime, my horizontal brain offered a final coup de grace – are you even in your prime? Well, you know what they say, if you have to ask, the answer is probably no.
The loose interpretation of being in the prime of your life is that you are in the best, most productive, most successful years of your life. I can probably just about get away with saying I’m still in my prime if I use those criteria, but evolutionarily speaking, our prime is more closely aligned with the active years of a premier league footballer, with an outer limit of around 35 years of age.
Thankfully our life expectancy outlasts our official prime by a long way, so I’ve started thinking that it might be worthwhile cultivating a sense of being in one’s prime, even if we are technically past it. But how to achieve this?
The face we see reflected back from the mirror every day is not an accurate reflection of our actual face. What we see is refracted through the filter of memory, the memory of our youthfulness, and the life force that still shines from our eyes that never gets old and has an amazing blurring effect on wrinkles, lines and blemishes. It tricks us into thinking we are young.
If you don’t believe me, cast your mind back to your first vaccination visit. Remember those vast vaccination centres full of people who were born in the same year and same month as you were? The reaction I had to the realisation that these were my people was nearly worse than the reaction I had to the vaccine itself. Could I really be the same age as this bunch of middle-aged people? I decided not.
I think self-belief (or self-delusion if you insist) is actually what keeps us in our prime. If you were to actually believe that you were old, past it, that your best years were behind you, how long would it be until you gave up. It’s like giving up on the idea that you might still one day live abroad for a year, or that you might have a grand love affair in your eighties or learn a new language after you retire.
To give up on the idea that our best years are ahead of us is to give up on hope. I take a Buddhist approach to the subject anyway – in my mind, as long as I’m alive, I’m still in my prime.
Besides, there are other ‘primes’ to be considered aside from our physical prime. People tend to do their most outstanding work in middle age, when they are considered to be at their smartest and most emotionally astute. And our brains go on learning new vocabulary until we are well in our 70s.
And just think of how often have you heard people saying things like, “I wouldn’t go back to my twenties if you paid me” or “I wouldn’t be 30 again for anything,” It suggests that the accumulated intelligence and experience that comes with maturity enhances life’s pleasures. Maybe that’s our bonus payment for no longer being in our physical prime – an intellectual dividend.
Kierkegaard said that “life must be understood backwards. But with this, one forgets the second proposition, that it must be lived forwards. A proposition which, the more it is subjected to careful thought, the more it ends up concluding precisely that life at any given moment cannot really ever be fully understood.” I think Joni Mitchell translated the feeling a little more succinctly in her song Big Yellow Taxi when she sang “you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.” Either way, I won’t be accepting or admitting that I’m not in my prime until the evidence is irrefutable.
Particularly not since I have discovered a piece of research that suggests people who feel younger than their age tend to live longer. It’s just a simple case of self-delusion over matter.
