Opinion The coming of age
Seeking a new way to go on is a creative act, the beginning of transformation. Perhaps, it takes an acknowledgement of impending mortality to spur one to change. A sense of urgency that this is it. Act now, or forever hold your peace.
No one wins or loses all. All aspects of life, the beautiful and the grotesque, form the sum total of our experience. Unfortunately, it takes some knocks to ignore one’s own internal drama put to rest the what-ifs and why-didn’t-I’s. 
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Among the assortment of colourful characters on season 3 of the trending show The White Lotus are three long-term girlfriends — ostensibly unwinding at a luxurious Koh Samui hotel but actually well in the throes of agonising mid-life crises. Attractive in the way the rich can be with subtly highlighted blonde tresses, plumped up skin and the countless other inventive strategies available to be deemed ageless, they almost succeed in creating the dazzling fiction of cool, imperious women of means and unprecedented power. “You look amazing!” they gush at each other but pour over every fine line and wrinkle worriedly. As these determined queens of reinvention discover, no one manages to outrun time. A carefully crafted image can double up as armour for a while till the facade becomes too exhausting to maintain. The White Lotus perfectly encapsulates how every age has its terrible perils. Youth, too. Nothing’s ever perfect.
“Live! Don’t squander the gold of your days,” advised Oscar Wilde to the young brushing off the middle-aged as “mortgaged to life” and the old as languishing in “life’s lumber room”. Indeed, youth is a blank slate, the future full of magical possibilities because experience hasn’t yet chipped away at one’s soul. These days, however, youth seems replete with perpetual angst since market forces and cultural changes suggest there’s no security in anything, careers or relationships. Mostly, the 20-somethings I see, eyes glazed over scrolling their phones seem to be profoundly dispirited, like really, this? That after slogging through school, college, extracurriculars and competitive exams, the mythical pot of gold is still tantalisingly out of reach. Or much worse, the pot isn’t all it was projected to be.
Sometimes it feels that throughout life there are goals to be chased but that we’re always falling short of expectations. There’s no question of sitting back and savoring the moment because the next step is already upon you. We have a number in our heads, that by some particular age we should have achieved so and so thing — especially if our contemporaries have. But always looking sideways in panicked envy takes the joy out of our own victories, however small. It’s normal to wonder if a different decision would have yielded better results; the lives not lived are wonderful to dream about but are a fantasy, since they’re beyond knowledge. A more reasonable approach is to recall that over a lifetime, there are many races, long and short. No one wins or loses all. All aspects of life, the beautiful and the grotesque form the sum total of our experience and must be embraced. Unfortunately, it takes some knocks to ignore one’s own internal drama and philosophically put to rest the what-ifs and why-didn’t-I’s.
Like the women on The White Lotus, these existential dilemmas usually play out in the years between 40 and 50. There’s a specific kind of groundlessness to middle age when people, increasingly aware of the narrowing options remaining are seized, not just by loopy thoughts of unfulfilled potential but dismay of not having lived the way one had originally wanted. Society mandated benchmarks that we assiduously and unknowingly followed — career, marriage, kids — can turn out to be confusingly unsatisfying. In harsh mode, our accomplishments are something we need to be convinced of but our shortcomings loom large in our imaginations. Yes, middle life smacks of regret but as Dostoevsky noted, “To awaken, we must turn our thoughts to death”. Seeking a new way to go on is a creative act, the beginning of transformation. Perhaps, it takes an acknowledgement of impending mortality to spur one to change. A sense of urgency that this is it. Act now, or forever hold your peace.
The writer is director, Hutkay Films
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