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by Gary C. Gibson

Created on: December 22, 2009

The life expectancy for Americans may be 77 years now, yet the process of aging has not changed, nor has the experience of the accelleration of the passing of time that occurs about age 30. That in retrospect may be the most significant aspect of the milestone of turning 30.

Reaching age 40 is still another yet less changing sort of experience. Perhaps after age 40 the familiarity of the changes of experience and health increase in intellectual interest yet decrease in novelty. Being an adult and experiencing the nature of  life for oneself are baselines facts that persist though the vicitudes of health and social opportunity may change or improve.

With sobriety and a concern for health physical fitness may be better at thirty for many than at age 20. The decline of health becomes apparent at age 40. It is the accumulation of injuries such as might be incurred through sports that compile over time and emerge in the 40s presenting the more awakening jolts for recognition of aging.

I think the process of life and the maximum life span that hasn't changed fundamentally from 120 years are much the same today as they were in former times before the appearance on Earth of The Son of God. The disciplined Roman Empoeror Sula died when worms made his abdominal guts so rotten that they just fell out.  WE moderns are generally spared that sort of experience. It may be that a reason why ancient Greek warriors preferred to die in battle wasd the comparative misery of life lived to old age and natural death. Forensic examinations of civil war casualties should that the vast majority of the soldiers had experienced absessed teetth. Pain ws a normal part of life for all people that we are spared of a little better today. 

If modern first world citizens have excellent medical cqare, live indoors in comfortable beds with climate controlled air and drive comfortable vehicles to non-physically challenging office environments what is it to jst happen to turn 30 or 40? Life experience has been a little less revealing in some regards,and perhaps turning 50 or 60 may be more of an equivelence to how life was experienced by the ancients at 20 or 25.

Perhaps there are two separate life paths in the United States today. One is for the insular and comfortable and the other for the poor, uninsured and unemployed. The first has a sort of etherialization in comfortable circumstances until no longer breathing, while the other has a more pessimistic outlook hoping to make if a while longer with health yet realizing that ahead life has many more pains, indignities and changes not fashionably or gracefully decorated. Such people may have a better chance to think about eternal things, and a new life in an imperishable, spiritual, body given by God.

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