One day when I was eight, and my dad was thirty-seven, I realized that I will never be able to catch up to his age, that he will always be twenty-nine years older than me. It frustrated me at the time because I wanted to catch up. I wanted to experience what it was like to be thirty-seven and I wanted to share that experience with my thirty-seven year-old dad.
But I couldn't. No matter how badly I wanted it, it just wouldn't happen.
Accepting that fact helped me realize something else: my dad will never get to revisit my age. He'll never get to be eight again. This made me feel proud to be eight. I was lucky to be experiencing something that he could not. No matter how badly he might have wanted to be eight again, he couldn't.
A few days ago I turned thirty-one. My dad is now sixty. We're still twenty-nine years apart.
I always remind myself that what's important is not your age. What's important is that you do not allow your age to influence your reality, to influence what you feel is true within yourself. How old do you feel? That's far more important than how old you are, because how old you are is how old you feel.
You choose and reinforce how old you feel by the thoughts and realities that you embrace, by what you accept and what you tell yourself is true.
I could've spent my entire eighth year wishing that I was thirty-seven, but instead -- fortunately -- I recognized how lucky I was to be eight. Today, I could think about what it means to be thirty-one, or I could think about what it means to be sixty. Or, I could simply live right here right now and enjoy it, the way I did when I was eight.
There's nothing we must handle with more care than the conversations we have with ourselves. We influence our reality, and in no greater place do we influence our reality than within ourselves.
Personally, I generally ignore this arbitrary measurement of our life called age.
But Ahhhh, the power of the conversations we have with ourselves, both negative and positive. We have the power to harm ourselves and the power to uplift ourselves to high levels of achievement, success and enlightenment. And we are the ones who get to decide how we treat ourselves.
Thanks for getting me thinking…
“I generally ignore this arbitrary measurement of our life called age.” As do I. 🙂 In fact, your comment reminded me of something I wrote six years ago, on my “25th” birthday: Completed 16.6% of my Life. By that same token, I’m now 20.6% the way through my life. 🙂
Thanks for sharing your other article. I am really enjoying the fact that many of your reply’s to my comments are leading to other conversation. I am enjoying getting to know you through your writing.
You’re most welcome, Mark! I love having an archive of written and published thoughts that I can refer back to, though sometimes that archive can be quite unwieldily! I’m lucky when I remember things that I’ve written in the past well enough to refer back to them and I’m often using Google to search my own site. 🙂
Hi Raam,
I think many of us have chatted about age with out parents. My children say ‘Oh! Dad, you are so old’. Yet, I have always felt younger than my parents told me I was. It was only a few years ago I actually saw my birth cert and went ‘okay they were telling the truth’. But I still feel young. It is all about perspective and well, truthfully, what does age really mean?
Have a wonderful day,
Thanks for the share
David
Hi David. Yes, it’s absolutely all about perspective! In fact, I have a theory that our perspective, or at least the perspective that we believe can actually have a real affect on the biology of our bodies, that our thought processes are responsible, at least in part, for the actual aging of our bodies. (I wrote more about this idea in Completed 16.6% of my Life.)