Just a number

I recently celebrated another birthday, and it gave me a chance to reflect on the way that we tend to assign certain meaning to milestone birthdays, or to have internalized judgments about who we should be, or what we should be doing, at a certain age or stage in life.

Age is just a number. And yes, 50 is different from 20. But is one better than the other? Not really. There are pleasures to be enjoyed at each stage in life.

We often fall victim to our preconceptions about what a certain number means, since there’s really no hard and fast way of determining of what it means to be a particular age. I’ve known people in their seventies and eighties who were vibrant and active, while I’ve known people much younger who were completely mired in the idea that “it’s all downhill from here…”

It’s only downhill if you think it is.

And since you’re the one writing the story, you can create the landscape any way you like.