Age is not just a number

Age is just a number

Happy Friday readers! This past Tuesday I turned 25, a quarter of a century, which means it’s time for my “quarter-life crisis”, or so says a friend of mine. This year I’m surprised to see how many people are considering their age. I had so many people who jokingly called me old! While sitting around the table at my birthday dinner, surrounded by a group of friends of varying ages, I noticed that everyone viewed age differently. One friend longed to have her teenage years restored to her and seemed to feel the weight of every additional year. One wondered about what would be the necessary goals for next year. Another said that when he turned 25, and then again when he turned 30, he had asked himself what he had done with his life. He sought to almost justify his life up until that point. I realized that with Edward’s help I had, for the most part, shed this idea of needing to tick off boxes in order to achieve happiness.

Age is another way we gauge our lives and other people’s lives by. We expect certain things to have been accomplished by certain ages; degrees attained, relationships constructed, homes established and babies born. We tend to view people as anomalies or abnormal if they haven’t followed this carefully constructed path. As someone who views their following of this path as a squiggly line that crosses back and forth over the meticulously straight line but never entirely on it, I have felt anxious in the past that I was doing things incorrectly. Yet here I am having just turned 25 and although not possessing the requirements for being a successful 25 year old, feeling incredible. I have never felt more secure or happy in my life and that has nothing to do with a silly number or what I have or haven’t ticked off of life’s to-do list. I am single, I am just starting my uni career, I rent a room and that means, according to societal norms, that I’m doing things late. It just goes to show how little age means. The people that have done things the way the book demands aren’t any happier than me, some of them might not even be as happy as I am. Because things can’t bring you happiness unless you are happy in yourself, like I mentioned in a previous blog.

25 might be a talisman or a symbol as the beginning of a good year, but that’s because I chose it to be so and therefore it will be. We put meaning into what we choose to put meaning into, we hold all the cards if we only realize that we have that power. So whether you are 15, 25, 50 or even 120 (As Edward will be) you choose what it means to you, you choose and create your own standard.

I like to think that the best gauge is by our happiness, our contentment and our appreciation of life. It’s also important to go with the flow and let go of what we once were and what we believed to be the best time of our lives. Keeping the memory as a souvenir but not as a comparison, because the grass always seems greener on the other side. Live in the present, not the past and not the future. Embrace your age, no matter what number and embrace yourself! We are beautiful and incredible creatures and the more years we spend on this earth the more time we have to learn and to and to Thrive.
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