Is Aging So Bad?
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Last week, I was listening to one of my favorite band’s’ newest album, Big Thief’s “Double Infinity,” when a track struck me hard. Adrianne Lenker, amid her signature otherworldly vocals and brightly melancholic guitar melodies, sang a particularly notable slew of lyrics that struck a chord with me.
The album’s single and hit track, “Incomprehensible,” chronicles Lenker’s feelings on aging: how society views it, and how she dares to view it alternatively. Her words, via pretty rhymes and masterful storytelling, lament on the beauty aging can afford us in life.
In the first verse, she sings “In two days it’s my birthday and I’ll be 33/ That doesn't really matter next to eternity/ But I like a double number, and I like an odd one too/ And everything I see from now on will be somethin new.”
In a society in which billboards constantly feature advertisements for the newest wrinkle cream and Botox is the norm once a woman turns 30, Lenker offers a new sense of hope for her future as she gets older. Age, she suggests, simply offers new life experiences to be had.
However, the crux of the song lies in the second verse. Lenker highlights the beauty she sees in her aging loved ones and questions how their stages of life could possibly be so “bad.”
“My mother and my grandma, my great grandma too/ Wrinkle like the river, sweeten like the dew/ And as silver as the rainbow scales that shimmer purple blue/ How can beauty that is living be anything but true?”
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She ultimately resigns herself to the natural processes that inevitably shape all of our bodies and minds. By declaring “Let gravity be my sculptor, let the wind do my hair,” she succumbs to nature in a way that rejects the notions of our larger pop culture in favor of a joy without a care.
I chose to highlight these lyrics not to shame those who fight getting older. After all, it is only human to desire an unchanging picture of youth for ourselves. It is what humankind has rebelled against throughout history, across cultures.
Rather, I hope that a listen to “Incomprehensible” or even a quick read of this blog might plant a seed for an alternative mindset as my peers and I enter adulthood and, in turn, the rest of our lives. Childhood is precious, teenagedom is fleeting and special and college is spoken into us as “the best four years of our lives.” But that doesn’t mean that the best years, the most memorable moments, and the happiest days of our lives aren’t still ahead of us.
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Lenker helps me to enter my 20s with a resolve to live in the present and to cherish every stage of life, both behind and ahead of me. I hope that her words might motivate the same in you.
Strike Out,
Anna Kadet
Editor: Sydney Annis
Athens