How Old Is Young?

My mom always says,”You’re only as old as you feel.” Which means that today I can feel fourteen, petulant, moody, disgruntled, while tomorrow I can feel eighty-two, nostalgic, perhaps frustrated, perhaps content. There’s something to the idea of age being arbitrary, more a feeling than a definite marker on a timeline. But this has me wondering: at what point does age become inescapable?

Parents, friends, family all look the same, no matter how much time has passed. We look the same to ourselves despite the inevitably of birthdays. We see these people on a regular basis, and (without getting into the physics of aging) we seem to age as a unit, frozen in time, destined to be twenty-three, thirty-two, fifty-one forever. At what point do we realize that while we may feel young at heart, the lines on our faces and the creaks in our joints, our newly established inability to consume the massive quantities of cheap beer and somehow stay awake long enough to watch the sun come up, tell another story? At what point do we realize that we can no longer run from the years and instead should embrace them?

For some of us, this is an everyday realization. We wake up aching with the thought of another day, another wrinkle. For some of us, the idea rarely, if ever, crosses our minds. For some of us, the thought means nothing. It is what it is: a fact of life. Regardless of how we internalize the phenomenon that is age, we all (at least those of us old enough to drink and pay for our own hotel rooms) would probably agree that certain experiences have a solidly sobering effect on us with regards to our current placement on the aging timeline.

Take, for example, the college football game. For those of us who are on the far side of Jack Daniels and the near side of the big three-oh, the residue of college still lingers, and every now and then we find ourselves trying to recapture the glory days. We drink too much, tell stupid jokes, and wake up the next morning realizing that we can’t quite party like we used to. But we can come close.

So we go to these football games feeling the way we did when meal plans were a necessary evil and eight o’clock classes were a ruse designed by the devil for our ultimate demise. We have always seen those who are older than we at these events, but for the first time, we begin to notice that there are younger folks as well. Surely, we think, they do not belong here. Surely they are here with their parents, and isn’t that quaint? At this point they become unavoidable. They are here in droves because students get free tickets, while you, the old fogey, have to pay for yours. They don’t even let you sit in the same section anymore. The realization of how much time has actually passed in the last ten years hurls itself into the forefront of your mind.

You watch the amateurs for awhile, noting their mistakes and hoping you never made the same ones. Then you smile to yourself. Finish the second beer you’ve had that night. Enjoy the game. Sleep comfortably in a nice hotel (if it’s an away game), instead of passed out on the floor of a friend’s studio apartment. And wake up the next morning sans hangover. As you sit down to a breakfast consisting of more than pop tarts and skittles, you realize that life at this point is pretty good. Things are different, but change is a good thing. Lines on the face are still few and far between, but they don’t really matter anyway.

Maybe age isn’t such a bad thing. Maybe each generation needs the one both before it and after to realize just how amazing life is.

*Note to reader: These are my views at this current time. Ask me again in four years, and you may get an entirely different story.