Time, time, time

Last year on the evening of my twenty fifth birthday I stood at the edge of a lake in Lethbridge, Alberta with the sun going down behind me and felt a tremendous sense of closure to my old life. I had already lived a whole quarter of a century, I had just graduated from college, it was the last day of our road trip to Canada and we were heading back south the next day. Everything I had looked forward to was over with. And the future more than at any other time in my life was a great unknown.

Today, one year later, it's my birthday again. I am twenty six. In talking to who are the close to the same age I am or a few years older, twenty six is when people start to become more and more surprised at how old they're getting. I've heard younger kids joke (and I've done it, too) about how old they're getting when they turn twenty or twenty one. But they don't fool themselves. They really know that they're still young. But at twenty six you start to get a sense of youth slipping away from you. It becomes stronger and stronger every year. And for a lot of people it's frightening. Time zooms by faster every year with more speed and force, and we feel more and more powerless to slow it down. It will be in a little while that we will be truly old.

From conversations I've listened to amongst people much older than me, this surprise at how old we're becoming never stops.

"I can't believe I'm thirty five already!"

"I can't believe I have a kid in high school already!"

"I can't believe I'm forty already!"

"I can't believe I have a kid in college already!"

"I can't believe my youngest has already graduated high school!"

"I can't believe we're grandparents already!"

Realizing that people are surprised by these things every day makes me determined not to be surprised by them, and by their accompanying sense of oldness. I know we can't stay young forever but we don't have to feel old if we don't want to. Right now, I am in the best physical shape of my life. I eat healthier and run six miles at least three times a week. I feel much more energetic than I did when I was a fast food guzzling twenty two year old. So in a way I feel younger now than I did four years ago.

Apparently I look young, too. A couple of days ago someone my age asked me if I was fresh off my mission. No, I said. It's been five years. But apparently I can still pass for a twenty one year old.

And we can still love birthdays, no matter what number is attached. Rather than seeing a birthday as a harbinger of decrepit old age, it's always a terrific reason to have a party.