I was on skype call with my sister today, and she said, ‘You’re getting old.” It was in relation to my complaining about a cold that’s been hanging around for about two weeks now.
Why is it that people  so readily say that sort of thing? A twenty or thirty year old could have a cold for a couple of weeks and no one would point out their advancing years.
There are other situations.
If you hear someone my age talking about having hearing or vision difficulties, you might not say it but you might think it, “Well, what do you expect?” But those sort of problems could also be acute conditions that happen to young people, too.
At a certain age, you’re conditioned to think that your memory is starting to go.  So, you buy extra sets of reading glasses and put them in different rooms so you don’t have to backtrack to find the ones you’ve misplaced – yet again. You meet someone on the street who you know reasonably well, but you can’t address them by name because you’ve forgotten it. You start to see this as a frequent occurrence that, of course, is the result of ageing brain cells. That view shakes your confidence in meeting the next person and likely forgetting their name also.
You read somewhere that after a certain age you inevitably lose muscle mass and that makes you weak, so you do less exercise because you get tired. Then, you become weaker over time and more fatigued. And so on.
Finally, you want to buy a meaningful or humorous birthday card but all you can find are the ones that make fun of age as demeaning or undignified. So you settle on something that is innocuous – perhaps a blank card with a pretty image.
Wouldn’t it be great not to have to reference age? To just be the age you are without the bagg-age that comes with being young or old. That’s the beauty of of cultivating the ability to be fully in the moment: this is the body/mind you have right now and you can make whatever you want of it.