What is age?

How old are you? A question asked of most people under the age of 15. Then casual friends quit asking and the question is left to the realm of older relatives. We are happy to announce particular birthdays such as 16 (ability to drive) and 21 (ability to drink, rent a car and be treated like an adult...ok, 2 out of the 3). After 21 our society encourages us to shelter our age, look younger than we are, but act as if we don't care. Recently I was in a conversation about the death of an 82 year old - car accident. "She was so young and vital" came from the mouth of my 81 year-old conversation partner. Yes, age is relative! A recent High School reunion helped me see that we all look about the same as way back when. Well, of course! Our facial bone structure has not changed unless some tragic accident had occurred. Some of us lost weight, most of us gained weight. Those that smoke or tanned show signs of skin damage - to be expected. So why all the worry about attending reunions? Why all the secrecy about our age? If you have any faith in physics, you know there is time. The clock is always ticking. Possibly it is the uneasy feelings concerning the future that makes age so daunting. What will the future hold? We are creatures that have the brain capacity to know there is a future and to express concerns about what will meet us there. "It could always be worse!" was a concern shared with me about a new boss. Wow! Each birthday must bring a need to order a higher dose of Adavn if each new thing could bring pending doom. But is the future really worse than the present? Yes, challenges come with living. I would pose that age brings experience, which if processed with a desire to learn, brings wisdom. So is the fear of age the acknowledgment that we are not learning from our life experiences? A fear that we are not truly living? Has it ever been posed this way? Surely it has. So life is full of challenges, as we age we can develop an ability to identify the challenge and use our wisdom to choose a solution, then learn from that solution. Without the constant surprise of life, we do not grow and we do not become wise. I look forward to aging. To the point where I can look back through my life, identify the challenge, the lesson learned and how that lesson helped me grow. Therefore, one is not growing older and closer to death, one is actually growing closer to understanding life!