Amy Lu's View

When I recently made a comment about turning 50, a good friend kindly told me, “Age is just a number.”

I appreciate the sentiment–I don’t think it’s a bad thing to be 50. As the song “Smile More” by Deap Valley goes, “I am not ashamed of my age.” In fact, as most of you are probably well aware of, I am making an officially BIG TO-DO about my 50th Birthday because it’s a socially acceptable way to get attention.

But I do think that numbers are significant, and while being 50 isn’t a “problem,” it definitely means something. It’s a substantial number (at least in this context). Turning 50 is weird and wild and worthy of reflection (via blogging and Facebook, of course).

While I didn’t wake up on my birthday as a radically different person than I was just the day before, it is an relevant marker of the passage of time. I am clearly (at least by my definition) no longer “young.” I do NOT want to be in denial about being older because I do NOT think that old has to automatically mean out-of-touch or unattractive or infirm (or running for President). Actually, I think to try and pretend I’m NOT 50 just feeds into all that craziness.

But yes, of course, it is all relative. “I’m older than I’ll be, and younger than I was, that’s not unusual.” (Simon and Garfunkel, “The Boxer”).

I think context is key when it comes to numbers: you rarely get the full meaning of a number without some background or knowledge of extenuating circumstances. (That’s why we have a windchill index, right?) Knowing that I am 50 in a world where I have had access to the health care I need with the added bonus of not actually needing much health care sets the stage for understanding what 50 means for me.

I want to embrace getting older without using it as an excuse for not be able to do things or not being able to do things as well as I used to (unless using it as an excuse in this way gets me attention when I forget the lyrics to a song during a show, etc.). Maybe I can say this because I didn’t do many of the things I do now when I was younger so I can’t make make ready comparisons. Maybe I would have learned lines more easily in my 20’s, and I certainly would have been able to run faster–but those past glories aren’t nagging at me.

Of course, aging does has it’s effects, and I know I will start noticing them more and more. I’m also am all for the practice of “age grading” in running and I would be happy to apply this to the rest of my life.

I DO notice that hangovers hit me much harder now than they did when I was younger…or is that mostly a matter of expectations? When I was young I didn’t hope to or think that I needed to get nearly as much done in a day, so it was easier for me to ride out a hangover by just lazing around.

Maybe in some ways I was wiser when I was younger!