How We Know We're Not So Young Anymore

When we started doing these Italian (and some French and English) sojourns, in 2010, it was twelve years ago last spring. As the years go by the details of these trips have provided us with specific points of comparison that enable us to see quite clearly that we are now twelve years older than when we started. Amazing!

A few years ago I read about a study—I have now looked up and it was in 2013. People were asked to look back at their earlier selves and what their personalities and tastes were like, and regardless of their current ages they were pretty good at seeing how much they had changed over time during the previous decade, but when they were asked what they thought their personalities and tastes would be like ten years in the future, they failed utterly, because they nearly all thought that things would be pretty much the same as they were now. The way I had remembered it, people were asked about more exterior aspects of their lives—their jobs, the people who were in their life, their health and activity level, that sort of thing, but this inaccurate memory was close enough to get me to the central point that people are not good at all at imagining their lives a number of years into the future.

When we started our European sojourns, we didn’t change the format much from year to year, or from spring to fall, or from Italy to France. The formula was that we simply rented a VRBO apartment half an hour’s walk or so from the school where we would spend mornings in Italian (and later French) language class. We would have restaurant meals usually midday, do regular grocery shopping and cook light dinners in the evenings in the apartment. We usually did one touristic attraction each afternoon, with longer side trips on weekends (although the first year when I was still recovering from a debilitating medical adventure I usually had an afternoon nap so there was somewhat less tourism, so in the seasons immediately following I got stronger instead of weaker). We also both had homework for our classes. Some of the time we had friends who lived in or near the city we were visiting, and we tried to get together with these friends, although some moved away and others have sadly died over these years. The changes that took place in our patterns from year to year were incremental and we scarcely noticed them. We felt pretty much as vigorous and active and ambitious for activity as we had in 2010, or as we remembered ourselves to have been in 2010.

This year after the Covid hiatus we have been confronted not by a single season’s loss in our powers but by three years’ worth of decline. We missed five seasons in between, and we are now (shock horror!) perceptibly older—especially in comparison with twelve years ago, but also with three years ago. The travel to get here takes a lot more out of us, especially me, and the fatigue lasts for days and days. We find that eating and drinking big multi-course meals, or a tasting menu’s larger number of smaller courses, fills us up more than when, perhaps, our metabolisms were higher? Two such big meals in a single day, we have found, interfere with our sleep.

And there’s walking on cobblestones, which I have written of separately.

But is it worth the effort to come to Europe and speak another language and eat—so much food? So far the answer is still yes.