Catching Up, Slowing Down

I caught up with friends last night over tea and cake, under a blanket on someone’s couch because even though it’s lighter later, every evening, it’s still chilly and damp in that Wellington way. We’ve all been out of town or working a lot or just plain busy so it was nice to just hang out a little.

We talked about how delicious cake is and the various things we did during the day and the new house one of us is moving into and our volunteer gigs and the trip to Queenstown one of us (me!) is taking next weekend and loud neighbours and excellent chairs one of us saw one time but didn’t buy even though we really should have and design aesthetic in general and houses in general and whether any of us, specifically, will ever buy one. We talked about cohabitating with our various partners. We talked a lot about our work: whether we like it, whether we’ll keep it, what we’ve done in the past and what we may do in the future. We talked about what starting a business might be like (one of us was able to tell us as she’s already done it) and how we’ve ended up where we are, professionally.

The two women I was with are about seven or eight years younger than me, as are many of my friends in Wellington. When I met them about four years ago there was a lot more talk about boys and parties and travel and we all seemed to be a lot more social and extroverted than we are now. Now we like to have tea and cake, fairly early in the evening. I think it’s great.

I did laugh a little as we were chatting, though, thinking about when I was their age and how I felt so out of place amongst many of my friends in the US who were beginning to marry and buy houses and have children: I felt like a total kid who had nothing in common with the grown-ups by whom I seemed to be suddenly surrounded. When I got to Wellington and was suddenly living out of a backpack and taking a lot of trips and kissing a lot of boys I got to be, for a while, the twenty-five year old I had not been when I was actually twenty-five. Now my younger friends are starting to say they’re slowing a bit—at thirty-one, thirty-two—and that they can’t party the way they used to. I am finally catching up by settling down.

(Meanwhile, I now know that all my cohort in the US who seemed so adult and responsible because of all their marrying and house-buying probably felt just about as random and confused as I did. Maybe weddings and mortgages blur those feelings a bit more than tickets to the other side of the world.)

I think I am glad I had an extraordinarily extended adolescence and young adulthood. I’m forty next year and obviously I have no idea what that means, but I think I’m glad I took a long time to grow up.