The thing about getting older is not just that you're getting closer to the end of your life. It's that your understanding of time changes, and with it your understanding of everything. You are no longer embedded in a static scene where nothing moves except perhaps your circumstances, but carried along in an irresistible river.
The corollary is that only by becoming older do you gain awareness of time and your proper relationship to it. Youth, as has often been observed, is a state of essential ignorance.
A friend sent me a short film of an artist whom I had the good fortune to meet before he got famous. I doubt that he remembers me, but he made a big impression, and he sparked some of my earliest interest in pottery. It's been about six years since I had to give up working with clay, and I felt a tinge of envy watching him load his kiln in a bleak winter landscape.
When I first started throwing, it was an addiction. I hardly thought about it in my working day, but I remembered it and my fingers would itch. I could barely raise a wall a few inches, but I had to keep trying, I had to keep touching the clay, I had to keep entering that wordless and almost thoughtless state. So I trudged through the snow under Chicago's orange winter sky night after night. It seems like it was always snowing that winter. I was profoundly lonely as I never had or have been again. I was a king.
Artists have their jobs because they always stay a few steps ahead of the rest of us. Not necessarily by being more talented (except that use makes master), but by being bolder. Not less afraid, but less able to turn back or aside.
Over a decade later, I have my own lab, and it looks like I get to keep it. Science was the greater addiction in the end, probably because it was older, this desire to make things to find things out. I'm really lucky. I can tell you a story about how I got here, but the only thing you really have to know is that it was by not going anywhere else.