Key Highlights
- What does it all mean?
- It’s not completely clear – but it’s certainly bothering my kidsAccording to research undertaken by Stanford Medicine in 2024, adult human beings are subject to two “massive biomolecular shifts” – spikes in ageing, in other words – one at 44 and another at 60, confirming what most of us instinctively know to be true: that we get older in jagged bursts – not with gentle, steady progression.
- As the new year issues its annual invitation to stocktake, the thing I keep thinking is where we might place the equivalent emotional pivot points, those periods in which, after years of – God willing!
- – pottering along feeling roughly the same, suddenly, one day, there’s a change. I bring this up because I seem to be in the middle of one, an inflection point that manifests in the number of times on the walk back from the school drop-off I stop to look at a bird in a tree, or a snail on a wall, or any number of other overwrought visual metaphors that allow me to feel momentarily like I’m inside a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins.
- Hard to put one’s finger on what’s going on, but it has to do with the sense of an ending, which, if it’s sad at all, isn’t sad-sad; rather, it occupies that category of sadness I think of as the anticipation of future nostalgia. These feelings of transition are largely brought on by external factors – in my case, my kids’ last year of primary school – but are also, obviously, subject to cultural cues.
