When Music Reminds Us We’re Aging

I went to a concert recently. The band, Counting Crows, mentioned they’ve been playing together for thirty years.

At first, it sounded like just another milestone. But then the number sank in. Thirty years ago, I was sixteen. I remember when they first formed.

Suddenly, I wasn’t in a crowded venue anymore. I was back in my first car, sunroof open, windows down, hot night air rushing in, their songs blasting as if they were written just for me. For a moment, I could feel it all again: the freedom, the raw innocence, the open road of possibility.

But then I was back in the present. Older, weathered, beat up, carrying three decades of life between that teenager and the man I am now.

That’s when the tears came.

The Grief We Don’t Expect

What surprised me wasn’t that I felt emotional (music has always had that power) but that what I felt was grief.

Not grief for something tragic, but grief for time itself. Grief for the innocence that belongs only to youth. Grief for versions of myself I can never fully inhabit again.

We usually think of grief as tied to death or endings. But grief is also what surfaces when we realize a season of life has quietly closed. An old song, a familiar smell, a photograph from decades past; they collapse time in an instant, and suddenly we’re face-to-face with the distance we’ve traveled.

The Bittersweet Awareness of Aging

This is what I've started to call the bittersweet awareness of aging.

It’s not just nostalgia. It’s not a longing to go back. It’s the ache of realizing how much has changed and how we can never return to the exact way things once were.

When we’re young, the future feels endless. But as we age, we look back and see the road we’ve already walked. There’s beauty in that, but also a quiet sorrow. A mourning for the untested energy, the wide-open horizons, the parts of us that belonged wholly to youth.

And yet, even in the grief, there’s something grounding. Because to feel that sadness at all means we are still alive to the music, still capable of being moved, still connected to the younger versions of ourselves.

Carrying Our Younger Selves With Us

Here’s the reframe I keep coming back to: aging isn’t about saying goodbye to our younger selves. It’s about carrying them with us.

That sixteen-year-old in his car, windows down, singing at the top of his lungs? He isn’t gone. He’s alive in me still, woven into the fabric of who I’ve become.

The same is true for you. Every past version of yourself: the child who dreamed, the teenager who ached, the young adult who stumbled and learned lives on inside you. They’re not lost; they’re threads in the great weave of your life.

When grief rises, it isn’t telling us to push those selves away. It’s inviting us to honor them. To recognize that they’ve shaped us, and that we still carry them, even now.

Aging as Integration

So maybe aging isn’t about diminishing. Maybe it’s about integration.

Every joy, every heartbreak, every late-night drive, every song we’ve ever loved; all of it is part of the tapestry that makes us who we are.

Grief, in this light, isn’t something to resist. It’s a reminder. A reminder that we have lived, that we have loved, that we are still capable of being touched deeply.

And when we let ourselves feel (even when it hurts, even when it feels overwhelming) we are strengthening the weave. We are not just remembering. We are still becoming.

An Invitation

If you’ve ever cried at an old song, you know what I’m talking about. That strange mixture of joy and sorrow, memory and grief.

If that happens to you, I want you to know this: you are not alone. This is part of the human experience. Part of aging. Part of loving and losing and still being here to feel it all.

So the next time you find yourself surprised by tears, let them come. Let them remind you that you were here then, you are here now, and you are still becoming.

Because your thread matters. Without it, the great weave would be incomplete.

What about you? Has a song ever pulled you back so vividly that you felt both joy and grief in the same breath? I’d love to hear your story.