Break Up With the Concept of Age

My 25th birthday was filled with anxiety. At the time I was focused on building my first business and for years I’d worked multiple jobs to make ends meet, while working 40 hour weeks on my new endeavor. This quarter century milestone felt like a huge passing; it was time to put away the fun times and settle down, think about a family and marriage, but in all honesty I hadn’t yet started to play. I felt like I missed out on an important part of life.

Flash forward to this past weekend, where I stood with four female white water kayakers, as one spoke about her milestone of retiring and reaching sixty-five. “Mentally I know I’m not a different person,” she said, “and it shouldn’t be such a hard thing to turn this age, but all I can see is the downhill in front of me. I know what aging means from watching my mom. I’m no longer getting up to go to a job. I’m officially old.”

I looked at her. She wore her white water helmet with nose plugs, for when she rolled the boat, along with her PFD and sprayskirt, “What are you talking about, the downhill in front of you?” I asked. “You’re a badass chica paddler?”

The woman next to her, also in paddling gear who was slightly nervous because she’d only been on the river a few times said, “Oh I know what you mean. I just turned 48-years-old and the eyesight is now going. I’m feeling the aches and pains. Aging sucks.”

I shook my head, and before I could stop myself, I opened my mouth again, “Or you could break up with the concept of age, and forget about it.”

They both turned and gave me an odd look. “What do you mean? Age is a fact!”

“No, it’s a manmade concept. You’re worrying about your age when you’re standing in gear to go run through rapids and you’re teaching twenty-somethings how to paddle. Why do you think you’re old just because of a number?”

It’s strange how much numbers can affect us. Whether it’s a digital read out on a scale at the doctor’s office, the birthdate on our license, or the amount in our bank account, numbers are everywhere deciding our success or failure.

Clocks tick down as we race to make that meeting, get frustrated while we sit in traffic, or look at the calendar and ask, “Where has the time gone?”

What would happen if we stopped basing our lives on these numbers?

When we ask about age or the numbers in our lives what are we really asking? Is it a judgement on where our lives ‘should’ be? Is it a status symbol that maybe we’re ahead of the game if we’ve reached a certain number up or down depending on our age, bank account, or weight?

Each decade of our lives has a societal plan. Early childhood has been relegated to playing and discovering; teen years are for rebellion or striving for that next step of adulthood; early twenty’s are for having fun and making mistakes; thirties for sacrificing for families and spouses; forties to having a mid-life crisis; fifties, well isn’t that when we start trying to hide our age and we begin to be unimportant to society? Sixties are for retirement. Barely anyone talks about the decades after because we fear what we see in nursing homes.

If you haven’t accomplished a huge dream of being a musician, olympian, artist, by early twenties it’s time to hang it up because you have to become serious. Passions become hobbies that are only allowed in the leftover time. Adults who become dancers or figure skaters or athletes are adorable or cute because they want to keep trying.

But who decided all of this? What makes these ideals so embedded in our culture?

Passions don’t go away because another calendar year passed. The love of laughter, playing, working hard towards your dreams pursuing your deepest desires, all these things should never have to end because of a concept of time.

If we were left alone, with good nutrition, no one around us, would we age in the same way, or would we find our own pace for life and our dreams? Would our biology remain younger if we didn’t see the passing of time or bought into the belief that it had to happen?

In 2015 I lost a good friend to cancer. We’d climbed half dome together, and had done a pairs routine in figure skating. He was one of the healthiest people I knew, yet throat cancer took him right around the time he turned 40. At thirty-eight he went from running marathons, getting married, and skating daily to cancer treatments that left him unable to walk.

When it came time to say goodbye, I asked him what I could do. He answered, “Keep living the way you live, one magnificent experience/dream to the next. Don’t ever stop. Now you have to do it for both of us. Break up with age. Never think about it again. Don’t even speak of it. Because you can live to 90 and never really experience life, or you can die at 40 knowing you did it all. Promise me these two things and make it great.”

At the time I thought it was the easiest promise to make. It wasn’t until a few months into my promise that I realized how often someone asked me how old I was. New people in my dance studio wanted to know my age. It was in my mortgage documents, or when I met a man that I might date. At the doctor’s office when I blew my ACL skiing and I was told after 30 I didn’t need replacement. “I’m a competitive figure skater and salsa dancer. I think I need my ACL,” I told the doctor.

I began to wonder what the question was really about. The more I tried to keep the promise of giving up the concept of age, the more I realized it’s a categorization just like if you’re black, white, hispanic, male or female, single or married. If people can’t categorize you, they can’t compare themselves to you.

The more I watched how society felt about age, and listened to the conversations of those turning 30 or 40, 65, or goodness forbid that 25 mark I was so worried about, the more I understood the lies within the story we tell about our life’s timeline.

My great, great, great uncle died at 105. He lived in his own home, volunteered in the community, and continued to carve masterpieces until his death. According to modern cultural perceptions of what a person looks like within a certain decade, he looked like he might be in his mid-sixties.

Yvonne Dowlen was still figure skating and competing well into her 90’s. I met her while we were both stretching outside at a figure skating competition. Her splits were as deep as mine. When I asked her the secret to the fountain of youth she told me, “Find your passion. The one that makes you happy to live out each day, and remember if you stop your rust.”

My writing mentor, Leila Meacham, didn’t publish her first International Bestseller, Roses, until she was in her seventies.

When I sat in my orthopedic surgeon’s office, waiting for my consult on that ACL repair, I heard him talking to another patient who needed a double knee replacement. “Tell me what you will do if you no longer have pain,” he said.

“I want to garden again.”

“Then if I do this surgery, you have to promise me when you come to the hospital you’ll have a plan for the garden you’re going to create. Without it I won’t go through with the procedure.”

When I asked him why he said that to her, he responded, “Those with passion, no matter the age, will heal faster when they have a reason to get healthy. You want to figure skate and dance more than anything. Your healing will take half the time of a kid who doesn’t care about doing anything more than playing video games.”

Life isn’t about how old you are. Aging is inevitable on a calendar, but a life lived with passion, with deep desires for more of the good stuff, is a life that becomes ageless.

Yet, age is indoctrinated within us by the time we’re two. Adults are asking us how old we are, and it becomes so impressed on our brains as important. After the second decade, age becomes our deepest fear, and for some, something they wish to hide so that they won’t be judged by a culture obsessed with youth.

To the 25-year-old me, I wish I could’ve had a heart to heart and tell her the future. “You’ll leave behind a concept of what you’re supposed to do in life. You’ll break every rule everyone has set for you, and there will come a time when you’ll break up with age and no longer mark time by a calendar year. Each day you’ll awaken excited for the awesome experience and fun times you’ll experience and you will never ever ‘settle’.”

When we break up with the concept of age, then we start companies in our seventies, or go back to college to start a new career. We don’t fret about not finding the perfect mate by a certain time, or settle for a person because it’s time to have babies in our twenties. Our lives aren’t marked by the numbers in our bank account as we race towards trying to have enough to retire, but instead we create our own paths, where retirement can happen in our forties and then we can come out of it in our 80’s to try something new.

We also break up with wasting time, because we know that age isn’t guaranteed. For each day that passes is a gift, and we are all on borrowed time that can be taken at any moment.

I’d love to hear your opinions. Leave a comment and tell me your relationship with age and how it would be different if you broke up with it.