A few days ago, I was half-listening to NPR’s Morning Edition as I drove to the train station to go to work… well, actually, I guess I was only one-third listening to it, as I was aware that they were interviewing some author but I couldn’t tell you his name or the title of his book, or really anything at all about the interview itself. Except for one idea that for some reason jumped up and grabbed me by the arm.

This mysterious, anonymous author said something about his belief that everyone has an internal age, a time in their life when they are their “most authentic self.” I remember him saying his own clock was set somewhere between 47 and 53 years old. Now, I don’t know what he was actually getting at because of that “only one-third listening” thing. And it’s kind of a confusing concept anyway. Does he mean that we have an actual chronological age at which our inherent personality traits and maturity levels “catch up” with the calendar and with society’s expectations of how a person that age is supposed to feel and act? Or does he mean we’re mentally stuck at a certain age regardless of our calendar age? Are those definitions really just the same thing and I’m parsing this too much? Probably.

In any event, I was thinking about this internal clock/authentic self thing over the weekend, wondering what it means and, of course, what my own internal clock might be set for. I know of at least one reader of this blog who would say that I’ve been going on 50-something for decades now (he’s told me so a number of times), and my mother has long maintained I was a 35 years old by the time I was seven. I understand why people say things like that. It’s because I tend to be overly serious, and I often express a fairly sour view of the world for a (relatively) young man. But honestly, I don’t see myself as psychologically middle-aged, in spite of what my hair- and waistlines are telling me. I don’t think my “authentic self” is 50 years old, or even 35. I’d say the real me is somewhere between 15 and 25.

I’m not speaking from nostalgia for bygone innocence or looking at my youth through rose-tinted glasses and thinking I was happier then than now, because I haven’t forgotten that I went through some rough times during that decade. But that was the period when my tastes and interests pretty well solidified (they’ve not changed a whole lot since then), and it was when I had the clearest idea of what I wanted to do with my life and who I wanted to be. My ambitions were the most coherent they’ve ever been (which probably isn’t saying much, but hey, everything’s relative), and I hadn’t yet begun to feel diminished through age and compromise and obligation. If that’s not the definition of authentic self, then I really don’t know what it is.

The sad thing is that my authentic 15-to-25-year-old self didn’t realize that he was living through the peak of so many aspects of his character. He always assumed that he — I — would become more confident as I got older, that things would become, if not easier then at least more clearly defined. It hasn’t quite worked that way, though. I won’t bore you all with some whiny confessional, but I will say that most of the time I feel like I’ve become less certain and more fragile with age, rather than stronger. Maybe that’s why I have so much sympathy for child actors, because I, too, feel like I peaked at the very beginning of my adult life and have been struggling ever since to figure out what to do with myself…

When it comes to spiritual matters, I’m what you might call a devout agnostic. I have no use for religion in my own life, but I don’t question the meaning and comfort it provides to a lot of other folks. I don’t know if there’s a god. I can easily imagine the universe coming into being all on its own. But that doesn’t mean that it did, which is a question I personally find unanswerable. And as for the question of whether human beings have an immortal soul and/or something to look forward to at the conclusion of this life, again, I’ve got nothing. Seems to me that it’s entirely plausible the thing we call “consciousness” is merely a function of the biochemical processes in our brains, and once those processes cease once and for all, everything that we are flickers away like a program derezzing in the movie Tron. But then it’s equally plausible to me that there is something more, since science assures us that matter and energy are interchangeable, nothing is ever really destroyed, and there are dimensions of existence we cannot perceive. I have a healthy enough ego that I certainly hope there’s an afterlife. As to what form it may take, who knows? I like to imagine we’ll be reunited with people who mattered to us, and maybe have a chance to put right the things we screwed up. I once suggested to a grieving friend that perhaps the best kind of afterlife would be nothing more than a re-creation of the time and place where we were most happy, a kind of substantiated, infinitely looping memory. But again, who knows? My personal philosophy about these things is probably best summed up by something Mr. Spock once said, “There are always possibilities.”

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For any Loyal Readers who’ve been waiting to hear how my buddy Jack did at Lotoja over the weekend, I’m sorry to announce that he had a rough time this year, battling a sinus infection that seriously impacted his performance. He finished the race in 14 hours and 12 minutes, his slowest performance out of the three years he’s ridden in this event. Still, he did finish, which is not an accomplishment to sneer at. I doubt I could get through the thing, even if I had an entire week in which to do it…