Old Lady

When I was younger and used to joke with my mom and dad about being old, they would tell me “If you keep getting up in the morning, one day that old lady will be sitting on your front porch.”

Voila! The old lady is now camped out on my front porch and she’s wearing a Harvard Kennedy School Mid-Career T-shirt that has been bedazzled.  There’s no escaping it…in the world of full time graduate students, I’m old.  

What made me make this realization, you ask?  It was the ice cream social hosted by the graduate dorm in which I’m staying.  (I’m sure I’ll write a more involved post about dorm living. Stay tuned!) Every person I spoke with was between the ages of 24 and 27.  They’re all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and with bedtimes after 1a.m.   They’ve decorated their dorm rooms with leftovers from their undergraduate days.  They have never lived alone long enough to fully appreciate not having to share a living space with strangers.  Don’t get me wrong, they’re all nice enough, but I feel like I’ve been slapped in the face with the term “old lady” and it smarts!

To add to my awareness of age, today I was able to connect with my manager from my first job.  I’m not referencing my first job out of college, I’m talking about my first job that I had as a teenager.  I connected with her on LinkedIn a while ago and right now we’re in the same area. I had not seen this inspiring woman in over 20 years! To paraphrase one of my Chinese classmates “Wow! That’s over two complete cycles of the Chinese calendar! That’s a long time!”  Thank you Harvard University for making sure I had that global prospective on the passage of time. :)

My time with her was amazing.  I’ve always looked up to her because she was feisty, opinionated, held her own in the male dominated banking industry and because she genuinely cared for her employees.  She had always been a trendsetter and as CEO of her own company she continues to set trends and blaze trails.  When she last saw me, I was a hardworking yet naïve teenager who had no definitive college plans.  I know that I was extremely fortunate to be able to tell her personally of the impact that she had on my life.

While I felt like a little old lady (the original meaning of LOL, mind you) there was something powerful about seeing my personal development through the eyes of someone who wasn’t there for the intermediate steps. She saw the diamond in the rough when she hired me 22 years ago and today she was able to see quite a bit more of the sparkle.

I may be older than these hard-bodied-party-all-night-full-time-graduate-student youngsters, but that’s OK. They’ve got to live a wee bit longer before they can have one of these awesome “blast from the past” moments and truly appreciate it.

Wisdom trumps youth. Always.