Less sensitive, or less selfish?

It’s said that as people get older, we become less sensitive to the things around us. As children, we can be entranced by very simple things, and even in our teens, the smallest thing can send us over the moon, or feel like a tragedy. I remember the tears on my school bus (not mine) when Take That split up. I wonder whether it would have been less devastating, although they weren’t really my thing, if we knew that they would be back in a decade. Perhaps not. Ten years is literally almost a lifetime when you’re only 14 years of age.

I feel though, as if I’ve become more emotional over the years, rather than less. I certainly find myself crying much more than I used to, for no apparent personal reason. There were a few stormy outbreaks during my teens, and some secret tears shed in the privacy of my own bed, but these days I can start crying when an accident is reported on the news, or I see people visiting at a hospital, even though I don’t know them or the patient being visited. I never used to cry watching films, even those Japanese dramas where the main actress inevitably died of some wasting illness, where cancer is made to look like consumption. Now, I’m like a leaky tap. I cried whilst watching Atonement. And during Coco before Chanel (!).

I still glance up and feel my breath catching when the light shines through the clouds, or when I walk through a particular picturesque scene. I still get the urge to stand still and capture the moment, wishing that I could do so with a photograph, but knowing that a) it won’t be the same and in any case b) I don’t have the patience.

True, I’m much less intense than I used to be, more calm and content. I no longer jump from one subject to another with the attention span of a flea in a poultry battery-farm. Rather than becoming insensitive, it’s more as if I’ve become MORE sensitive to other things, but in a more rational way. I’ve learnt to appreciate things more, to take in the finer details and letting them sink in. There are times when my thought processes leap around and take a running jump into randomness, but I’m more aware when it happens and rein them back before they go wild.
I think as we get older, we become less intense, because we are more aware of the events and people around us. We are less inclined to classify our own personal disappointments and upsets as tragedies, even if they might be, because there is always something else worse. A bad hair day isn’t the disaster of the year when you know someone who has had chemotherapy and lost all their hair that way. The flip side that comes with this coin is no longer going into ecstasies because you got the present you wanted, or you get to have chocolate and raspberry ripple ice cream (in a cone, with a flake and jelly tots). We remember to count our blessings, and our joy might be tempered by other stresses and responsibilities lurking in the background, or the guilt that others aren’t as fortunate. But these responsibilities may be what keeps us going when things go wrong, the fact that we need to consider other people as well as ourselves.

I guess what I feel is that I’m more aware of feeling happiness when it’s there, and less despairing when it’s not. Sometimes I wish I was a child again, living so much in the moment. But usually, I’m quite happy as I am now as well.

(Image from http://www.kesher.org.uk/)