The Mind’s Age

Listening to Shelagh Rogers interview Douglas Copeland on CBC radio one morning really got my creative writing spark heated up. I wanted to leave work that day and head off to a coffee ship to write for the rest of the day. Some day my words will make me money, but until that happens, they’ll just have to make me happy.

Today’s brainstorm deals with age and perception, something the two speakers touched on in their captivating discourse. We all have a specific concrete number that defines the years we have lived on this planet. We also have a more abstract number. More specifically, this alternative number defines who we think and feel we are inside. If you were to close your eyes and relax and think about how old you really feel, the chances are the number will be less than your actual age. We all have our ‘mental’ age and each person’s differs for their own reasons. The two radio personalities postulated that our mental age was one at which we felt the most happy with ourselves and our life at that time.

I’d never gone much past 30. For me, 30 was an ideal age – still young enough to be forgiven for my frivolities, yet sufficiently mature to be taken seriously on most levels. Recently though, my mental age is beginning to catch up with my physical one.

Before I turned 40 I dreaded the prospect of hitting middle age. It loomed in front of me and I had visions of suddenly becoming ‘old’. Until I decided to attack it back with the same ferocity with which I was allowing it to control me. Suddenly I had become empowered. By taking jurisdiction of it, complete with fighting stance and “bring it on” attitude, I turned this pivotal milestone into a memorable and enviable event. My ideal age of 30 transformed overnight to 40. If I willingly take into account that my mental age reflects the time I was the happiest, then my two ages have melded, and are continuing to meld as I keep aging, into one. Perhaps growing older is not so bad when you consider the benefit of maturity and expanded knowledge base combined with the freedom to answer only to yourself.

I still have days when I feel like I am back in high school, but am quite thankful that those days are long behind me. I think it all comes down to the quote by Mohammed Ali, “Age is whatever you think it is. You are as old as you think you are.” For me, as long as I am happy, I am happy with my age.