Getting Older

There has been so much talk lately about the 90s. The music, the clothes, the small details of life that now feel almost impossibly far away. The sound of CDs sliding into a player, brown paper lunches folded neatly in backpacks, checkerboard Vans scuffed from the pavement, pizza slices wrapped in wax paper at the little place in town where two dollars still felt like enough money for something good.

It started as nostalgia, but nostalgia has a funny way of turning into reflection.

Because when you begin looking back that far, you inevitably begin thinking about time itself. The generation you came from. The one that shaped you. And the one you are slowly becoming.

And lately I’ve been thinking about getting older.

For some reason, in my mind, I still think of myself as 27 years old. I’m not entirely sure why that number settled there and decided to stay. It wasn’t even a good year, truthfully, it was a terrible one. But maybe that’s just the age I feel inside. Maybe it’s the version of myself that still lives quietly somewhere in the back of my mind. Maybe it’s the age I still imagine when I picture myself in the mirror. Though wouldn’t that be nice.

I’ve noticed I do something similar with my mom. I remember asking her once how old she was, and she answered simply, “Forty-two.” And ever since that moment, that is the age my mind holds onto when I think of her. At the time, forty-two sounded ancient to me. Grown up in a way that felt impossibly far away.

Now I am just three years shy of that number.

And suddenly forty-two doesn’t seem old at all.

My mom is nearly seventy now, and when I look at her I still don’t think of her as old. Because age, I’ve come to realize, has very little to do with the number attached to it. It’s about how you carry yourself. How curious you remain. How you laugh. How you love. How you move through the world.

Of course wisdom comes with age. And like everyone else, I sometimes wish I had the wisdom I have now back when I was younger. I wish I had known a few things sooner. I wish I had cared about certain things earlier. But the truth is, I don’t mind getting older. In many ways it feels like the most honest chapter of life. Because with time you begin to understand that taking care of yourself is not a luxury, it’s a responsibility. Not just now, but at every age.

There are things I wish I had done more carefully in my younger years. Simple things that seemed unimportant then but feel obvious now. Taking care of my skin, for one. Learning that good skincare is not vanity, it’s maintenance, it’s respect for the body that carries you through life.

Eating real food, whole, nourishing food, because it turns out that what we eat really is our first and best form of health insurance.

Learning that the people you surround yourself with quietly shape the direction your life takes, sometimes more than you realize. The rooms you sit in, the conversations you entertain, the company you keep, they will either pull you toward the person you hope to become or gently guide you away from her. And perhaps most importantly, learning that self-respect is far more valuable than the attention of a cute boy.

Some lessons take time.

Now I find myself doing many of the things I wish I had started earlier. Taking better care of my health. Taking supplements. Checking my hormones. Going to the dentist more often than I used to. Creating routines and small daily rituals that ground me. Because routines are the quiet architecture of a life. They are the building blocks of consistency. And consistency is what makes getting older manageable. It is what keeps you steady. And getting older does bring its challenges.

You begin to notice time in ways you never did before. The elders in your life begin to fade. Your favorite movie stars from childhood start to look different, older, more fragile, and you realize one day that will be you too.

With age comes more change. More loss. More uncertainty. The quiet awareness that life is finite, that none of us truly knows how many years we have ahead. And when I think about getting older, yes of course I sometimes think about my appearance, like most people do. I think about wrinkles and time and the slow changes in the mirror. But I think about other things even more.

I think about my boys. I think about my parents, my siblings, the life that feels so familiar and steady right now. And the strange understanding that one day this version of life will no longer exist in the same way. One day the world will look very different for my boys. And that thought alone reminds me of something incredibly important.

To cherish the moments we have right now.

To slow down and be present in the life that is unfolding around us every day. To sit at the table a little longer. To hug a little tighter. To say the words that matter while we still can. Because love should never be something we assume people already know. Kindness should never be something we postpone. And telling people what they mean to you should never feel like something that can wait for another day. Time has a quiet way of moving forward whether we notice it or not. And someday those chances may not come again.

What a sad thing it would be to realize we had them, and simply let them pass by.

So if getting older teaches us anything at all, perhaps it is this:

Take care of yourself.
Take care of the people you love.
And hold tightly to the moments that make up a life.

Because this life, right now, exactly as it is, is the one we get to live.