Few things in our world are more relative than our estimate of another person’s age.
My daughter and I were swigging cappuccino at
“Are you the young man who writes the columns for the newspaper?” the older woman asked me.
“Yes, ma’am,” I confessed.
“I appreciate what you write so much,” she said. “I read your column every week.”
I almost got up and hugged the lady. Not because of the nice things she said about my writing, but because of the way she identified me.
With my shock of white hair advertising the reality of my 60-plus years, it’s been a long time since anybody has called me a young man and meant it.
Several years ago a friend and I attended the birthday party for a man who turned 108 that day. Still agile in mind and body, the old gent regaled us with tales from his past. Later my friend and I chuckled as we realized that many of the stories the man had begun with “when I was a young fellow” actually happened when he was well past 60.
Like beauty, “young” is in the eye of the beholder. To a two- year-old, anybody over 30 seems ancient.
Do you remember when your mother frustrated you by saying, “You’re too young to do that yet”? Depending on the decade, you were too young to stay up late, to date, to wear makeup, or to drive the family jalopy.
Now a host of us spend more time than we ought to wishing we were young enough to do a raft of things we once did with ease.
Could it be that our inability to perform certain feats anymore is more than made up for by finally being wise enough not to try?
What does it say about us that most of us spend our entire lives wishing we were either older or younger, discontent with the age we happen to be at the moment?
“However many years a man may live, let him enjoy them all,”
one wise man advised (Ecclesiastes 11:8). And he’s right. “The glory of young
men is their strength, gray hair the splendor of the old,” Proverbs