For Donald Trump's 80th birthday, which the President celebrated yesterday with a series of UFC fights in the garden of the White House, the New York Times asked some famous octogenarians from music and cinema to give their impressions of the best and worst parts of this phase of life. Among the various artists interviewed, Bob Dylan stands out, who is now 85 years old.
For Dylan, the best thing about being eighty is that “You're no longer in a hurry to become someone and you're not haunted by what you've done.” The musician explains it best with an image: «You are an old king of a disappeared country». The worst thing, however, would be “that you still want to say yes to everything, but the world goes on without asking” and that “the old fire in your heart keeps telling you to do this and that, but your body tells you that you've already done it”
Regarding the request, Dylan also wanted to add “the really worst part of being eighty” which for the artist means that “you come to understand something that could have changed everything in the past, if only that understanding had come when there was still something to change”.
Below is Dylan's entire thought extracted from New York Times.
The best thing
The best thing about being eighty is that you survive the clocks that have chased you your whole life. It is freedom from that lie that anything was ever truly under control. You no longer run after the parade. You are an old king of a vanished country. You are harder to tame. You are no longer in a hurry to become someone and you are not haunted by what you have done. You're haunted, rather, by how little of this has actually mattered in the way you thought it would.
The worst thing
The worst thing about being eighty is that you keep wanting to say yes to everything, but the world moves on without asking. The old fire in your heart keeps telling you to do this and that, but your body tells you that you have already done it. And there is nothing that surprises you anymore. It seems like a privilege, but it's not. You've also run out of illusions. People treat you like you've solved something or like you've lost something, but neither is true. You see life repeating itself everywhere.
The really worst part
The truly worst part of being eighty is that, finally, you come to understand something that could have changed everything in the past, if only that understanding had come when there was still something to change. As a young person you think that time moves forward. At eighty you know that this is not the case: time stands still. We are the ones who move.
