The ages inside of you
Mar 3, 2023 20:24:10 GMT
Post by kerouac2 on Mar 3, 2023 20:24:10 GMT
I think we all have at least three ages in addition to our calendar age.
One of them concerns our health and is probably the most pitiless. Those of us who are lucky still feel a bit younger than what the calendar tells us, but not everybody. I don't feel all that much younger than my calendar age, but I do not suffer from lots of the complaints of people my age -- no aches and pains, not too many medications, still some pretty good stamina for doing things like walking, physical tasks and things like that. I remember how upset my father was when he saw that I could unscrew pickle jars after he had failed to do so. "But that's because I loosened it first" he would claim. Probably our estimates of our capabilites are not extremely accurate, but we have additional proof one way or the other every day.
Another age is our mental age, which in most cases seems to be far younger that what our exterior shell would indicate, 20 or more years younger at the very least. My mental age is in flux because for certain things I could be 20 years old (musical tastes, video games, crap like that) and for others I am much more "mature" (political realism crushing many of my youthful ideals as much as I hate it comes to mind). We see mental age a lot on television commercials where the women who need urinary pads look no older than 40 and then men calling about their own funeral arrangements look like they are 50.
What I find the strangest is my age in dreams, which seems to remain pretty stable. I seem to be about 30-35 years old no matter what the situation, whether I find myself in my childhood bedroom which I never saw after age 13 or visiting my extremely old grandmother who died in real life at age 92 but who came back to life in my dreams and is now about 125. When I dream of work, even when I know that I supposedly retired and am just visiting the office, I am still in the 30-35 age bracket. Colleagues from that time have ages that correspond to my own dream age.
Anybody who believes in heaven must wonder what age they are supposed to be in their afterlife. Almost certainly not a child nor old and decrepit which is how most of us will die. So I can only image that I 'm supposed to be 30-35 years old.
One of them concerns our health and is probably the most pitiless. Those of us who are lucky still feel a bit younger than what the calendar tells us, but not everybody. I don't feel all that much younger than my calendar age, but I do not suffer from lots of the complaints of people my age -- no aches and pains, not too many medications, still some pretty good stamina for doing things like walking, physical tasks and things like that. I remember how upset my father was when he saw that I could unscrew pickle jars after he had failed to do so. "But that's because I loosened it first" he would claim. Probably our estimates of our capabilites are not extremely accurate, but we have additional proof one way or the other every day.
Another age is our mental age, which in most cases seems to be far younger that what our exterior shell would indicate, 20 or more years younger at the very least. My mental age is in flux because for certain things I could be 20 years old (musical tastes, video games, crap like that) and for others I am much more "mature" (political realism crushing many of my youthful ideals as much as I hate it comes to mind). We see mental age a lot on television commercials where the women who need urinary pads look no older than 40 and then men calling about their own funeral arrangements look like they are 50.
What I find the strangest is my age in dreams, which seems to remain pretty stable. I seem to be about 30-35 years old no matter what the situation, whether I find myself in my childhood bedroom which I never saw after age 13 or visiting my extremely old grandmother who died in real life at age 92 but who came back to life in my dreams and is now about 125. When I dream of work, even when I know that I supposedly retired and am just visiting the office, I am still in the 30-35 age bracket. Colleagues from that time have ages that correspond to my own dream age.
Anybody who believes in heaven must wonder what age they are supposed to be in their afterlife. Almost certainly not a child nor old and decrepit which is how most of us will die. So I can only image that I 'm supposed to be 30-35 years old.