Welcome to week 15 of Contemplation, where we share our responses to a prompt from my Kikki.K A Sentence A Day Journal.
Last week, we talked about what challenges we’d overcome that day and many of you commented (as did I) that challenges often seem so much worse when there are a lot of them, or when we aren’t feeling well. On Sunday, I somehow twisted my back again and threw it out of alignment. The same problem as last time – one of my ribs is digging into my spine and it’s excruciating. I can’t stand up straight because I’m hunched over on one side. But what’s worse is how big the trivial things became when I was in pain. I’m feeling a bit better tonight but last night was very hard. Even the smallest things became diabolical. I cried when I discovered that the loaf of sliced sourdough I’d bought that day wasn’t sliced all the way to the bottom. Every slice was still connected. I know – first world problems, right?! But it was just too much to deal with. Is this something we can learn to get better at? Or is it just the way our mind and body works?
Anyway, enough of last week. Let’s move on to this week’s prompt: Do you feel younger or older than your actual age?
Short answer – younger, unless I’m getting up off the floor 🙂
I come from a small country town. Most of the girls I went to school with had kids and/or got married in their early 20s. It has been 25 years since we left high school and I have never been married nor had kids. That’s something that always seems to stick with people. I feel like they don’t know where to place me and I guess they assume that I’m younger than I actually am because I’m living the single life. My relatives for a long while considered me to not be a real “grownup” because I didn’t have kids. Some of them assumed I must be gay, which I’m not, and that bugged me at first because what business is it of theirs anyway? And it made me feel like I was letting my people down. But I realized a long time ago that actually it’s not me that’s the problem, it’s just the way they see the world – they need to be able to pigeonhole people because it makes them comfortable.
I will always appreciate an old boss of mine who made a point of challenging the “because that’s the way we’ve always done it” argument. He would often ask why we did something a certain way and that was our response – “because that’s the way we’ve always done it”. He made me stop and think about why we believe the things that we believe. It’s often just easier to keep doing the same old thing rather than take a risk and try something different or believe something different, consider a different point of view, think about life’s experiences from another person’s perspective. I am grateful for that lesson, I think it’s made me a more sensitive person, a more open-minded and accepting person and someone who isn’t afraid of challenges and change. And I think it keeps me young as well.
While I usually feel younger than my age, it isn’t something I really think about. Unless of course I’m hanging out with a group of younger people and they don’t know what it means to actually “hang up” a telephone. LOL. Luckily, I also have quite good skin and often get mistaken for looking younger than my age 😊
When I consider that I’m now (just) on the other side of 40, I do start to feel it. I don’t really feel like starting a new home loan at my age, especially as a single person, so I’m renting while I figure out what to do. I do need to wear my glasses more often now and I guess my back issues have come on as I’ve grown older. I can definitely still party like I used to but I just can’t quite recover like I used to anymore 😉
And of course I think about my family and how my getting older means they’re getting older which is something I don’t want to consider. I’m going home to visit them soon and I’m wondering how much they’ve changed in the 6 months since I last saw them.
How about you? Do you feel older or younger than you are? Or do subscribe to the old “you’re only as old as you feel” adage?
x desleyjane
Musings of a Frequent Flying Scientist 
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