Telling people my age can be tricky business. I may have traveled around the sun a certain number of times, and that is precisely defined by the calendar. But I think my own true age is something quite different.
For over a year, I have stopped checking the “white” box on forms that want to know my race. I think it is time to stop checking the “over 60” box as well.
I am aware that my calendar age speaks one message, but my whole notion of self is on a different track. My mind just doesn’t conform to my number of trips around the sun. My body shows some of the traits of my age related to sun trips. That includes grey hair, thin skin and stiff legs when I get up. But I don’t think all my body has aged at the same rate as the calendar story says it should have.
I admit that I get a little internal glow when people tell me that I don’t look my age, or they fein surprise when I tell them my age.
I try to throw out all the myths about age and rely on my own reality. I typically choose a path of my own. I hardly ever use “age” as an excuse, except that I now avoid wanton climbing of ladders. Mostly, I will not be a vassal of the tyranny of the Julian calendar.
I think calendar age is simply a comparison with what we know about most people who have made a measured number of trips around the sun. It actually tells me nothing about all the traits typically associated with age. It only says that such and such is typical of someone my age in calendar years.
Because of my lifestyle, I have traits unlike someone who has made a similar number of trips around the sun. There are even times that I say that I have lived multiple lives in the calendar space of one lifetime. Maybe I have actually aged far beyond my calendar years. I feel rich, abundant and joyful. None of that can be understood by knowing my number of trips around the sun.
I experience a kind of insight that I seldom see in someone else who has made as many trips around the sun as I. I think most of my generation is severely lacking in insight. A friend has pointed out that the insight I experience may come from having been alive in other ways or other times. She suggests that I may have been here before because some experiences seem so familiar to me and are not typically learned just by making trips around the sun.
My body is more agile and stronger than it was several years ago. That hardly means that I have made reverse trips around the sun. Just knowing my trips around the sun has little relationship to my agility or strength.
Knowing my trips around the sun reveals little accuracy about how I think. As a friend told me, I sometimes think more like a millennial than a baby-boomer. My mental agility is so much more flexible and unbounded than most of my wearisome contemporaries. The trips around the sun have had very different effects on us.
My trips around the sun have been accompanied by great freedom from so many social, cultural constraints that typically seem to bind so many of my contemporaries into compliance.
My open-hearted approach to plants, rocks and people is more typical of the discovery experience of one who has made either far fewer or many more trips around the sun. Where I see others my age closing in, I see myself as opening up.
I now recognize that when I tell others that I am “old” it is to mock the presumption of age. I do not see myself as fitting into the mold of someone my age in trips around the sun. What does telling my age describe except to define what category of humans I belong in. I clearly don’t see myself belonging to any of them.
So from now on, I will not check the box that says “over 60”. I may simply choose another age that better matches my attitude that day.