My third year in college, a few of my fellow students did a semester away from the Maine campus at an internship in New York City. It was 1975. I was nineteen.
My classmates returned with Earth, Wind, and Fire, and the Bermuda Bus Stop. It was like nothing we had experienced, and it was electrifying. We didn’t know, but we were at the developmental stage for peak receptiveness to novelty. We didn’t think we’d get enough to want to stop.
For most people, curiosity and openness to new ideas, new experiences, new people, arrives somewhere in our mid-teens, plus or minus aged 15. Parents often watch with alarm at new hairstyles, clothes, behaviors, interests, and friends that suddenly appear out of character. That watching with alarm is interesting because those parents typically had done the same thing at the same age with the new for back-in-the-day: music, hairstyles, clothing, behaviors, and interests.
Why our parents and teachers didn’t turn up the volume on Earth, Wind and Fire and start funking out with us, is a curious thing. They had turned up the volume on Benny Goodman, Count Basie, and Glenn Miller. Why are they looking askance at this?
That peak openness to new ideas, new experiences, and new people curiously closes at around 25 years of age. From birth to aged 25, our brains keep growing in volume. Most of us reach our full height in our late teens. Nonetheless, our brains keep growing for another half dozen years. After our brains reach full volume, most of us curiously become less curious.
One result of losing that electrifying response to the new that our brains gave us when they were still growing, can be a sense that nothing now is as good as what we experienced during that time. It’s that nostalgia for what is remembered as the good old days. The writer, Ocean Vuong says he will ask people.”Where is again?” They invariably go back to that time between their late teens and mid-20’s when their world was fresh and sparkling. It was our personal Garden of Eden that has been lost.
Coincidentally to my thinking on this topic, a podcast with astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson and comedian Chuck Nice showed up in my feed. Tyson reflects on recently turning 67 and on his years between 15 and 25 when he was a top-level wrestler, then a professional dancer, two things he’s left behind. However, rather than waxing nostalgic, Tyson talks about his lifelong quest to learn something new everyday. He says he takes in something new sometimes all seven days, but at least five days a week.
Tyson hasn’t lost curiosity; and, therefore, isn’t missing the good old days, because he has spent the forty years since his brain developed its full volume to keep expanding its capability. By going after something new every day, he hasn’t experienced his curiosity diminish. He still experiences the new and electrifying. What’s curious is the new and electrifying never stops unless we stop plugging into it.
The Garden of Eden is still growing.
Warm regards,
Francis Sopper
REFERENCED IN THIS LETTER:
Earth, Wind, and Fire: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=god7hAPv8f0
Bus Stop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ViP33bSNobc
get enough: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yURRmWtbTbo
Benny Goodman: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benny_Goodman
Count Basie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Count_Basie
Glenn Miller: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenn_Miller
Ocean Vuong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_Vuong
Neil deGrasse Tyson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2C-Hy9NFbEE
Chuck Nice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Nice