Age – is it just a number?
Last birthday, I turned 65 and became a senior citizen overnight. I even have a gold card to prove it. I get given money every fortnight just for being alive, which makes me feel unaccountably guilty even though I’ve been working since I was 16 and paying into the system both in the UK and NZ. I get discounts in cinemas and petrol stations and could travel free on buses, if I lived in a place where there were such things. It’s a definite milestone in my life, like being old enough to vote or emerging relatively unscathed on the other side of menopause. Yay me.
But such an important age-related milestone forces me to think about age and ageing, and engage in conversations with women of a similar vintage about the journey we are on. Many are fighting it with hair dye, fashion, surgery and makeup with increasing energy. Why?
All my life I have heard people say, jokingly, that age is just a number, and we are as old as we feel. Now, I look at that old chestnut differently, and with questions I never thought to ask before. Do we mean that the number doesn’t matter? That 65 is no different to 35?
What does it mean to feel old? To feel young? Are these cliches just another example of how we deny the value and privilege of growing old, wanting instead to always be considered young? Why is ageing something I should fear?
When I lived, briefly, in Bangladesh, I walked past women who worked on building sites who smiled and greeted me every morning. Their job was to carry bricks, gravel, stones or sand in baskets on their heads to the men working on the actual construction. Hard work in the hot sun had hardened their brown, lined faces, their arms and legs were stringy with muscle and bone and I couldn’t say if they were in their 50s or their 70s. They were poor, and had few options, but they had a job they could do that wasn’t begging and were therefore not a burden on their families. They are probably dead now – I doubt that such hard lives would be long ones. How can I complain about growing old when I have those women in my memories?
I’ve recently been involved in writing the Epic Sharing courses in the Here and Now series. Aimed at demystifying some of the much discussed topics of today that are constantly evolving, making it hard for many of us to keep up with the changes, these courses bring the concept of age to the fore, whether they mean to or not. One of them – Generations 101 – tackles it directly, explaining generational labels and the different experiences we all have depending on our age.
Someone like me, whose childhood is lost in the mists of the 1960s, has had a totally different experience of growing up and learning about the world to someone whose childhood was in the 2000s. Whatever the topic under discussion, from music and movies to technology and climate change, our perspectives are inevitably going to be worlds apart. No matter how much effort I put into embracing the current zeitgeist, I can never see it in the same way as a person born in the year 2010. They bring to it the same affinity as a fish has to the water it swims in, whereas I am bringing almost half a century of experience in a very different world – one without internet, smartphones or social media.
So maybe age is more than just a number. Maybe it is saying something quite profound about who we are and how we see and interpret the world. And maybe, that isn’t such a bad thing.
In many non-Western cultures, age is viewed differently. People don’t fight it and try to remain forever youthful, competing in a contest they are always going to lose. They take on the roles that their culture offers them, and needs them to occupy – the elders, the storytellers, the transmitters of history and wisdom. What if we did the same? What if we accepted growing old as the privilege it undoubtedly is – the alternative is much worse, after all!
What if we gracefully stepped aside and left centre stage to the younger generations whose turn it is, and concentrated instead on what contributions we can make from the perspective of our greater experience, whilst at the same time being open to learning what the younger generations have to offer. What if those younger generations were able to turn to us for advice and support because we were not trying to compete with them? What if we were respected because we earned it by giving them a model to follow?
If I am as old as I feel, then I feel 65. I try to keep myself fit and healthy, but I don’t try to keep myself young. I only have to spend time around younger people to know that I am not young, but that doesn’t mean that I am irrelevant. I just have to find where I can contribute and how. Writing some of the Here and Now courses enabled me to tackle some of the topics with the understanding that comes with age, either by being able to explain them to younger people from an older perspective or by explaining new concepts to older people like myself.
Learn More About Generational Differences. Enrol in Generations 101 Now! Or bring yourself up to date through our Understanding the Here and Now suite of courses.
Responses