by Deborah Hall

Created on: August 03, 2008

Growing old has taken me by surprise. I feel like Barbara Stanwick in Thorn Birds who knows she is in the body of an old woman but feels like a girl inside. I can remember my mother saying "if I knew now what I knew when I was young"...I was young at the time and didn't realize what she meant because I thought I was all grown up and knew what I was going to know even at the age of fourteen. When I look in the mirror I don't deny my physical self; it just doesn't happen to change the way I think and feel about my self, my life, and what types of activities I do or who I choose to do them with.

I am not the conventional old lady. I neither am a mother or a wife nor am I a grandmother. I still like loud music and singing at the top of my lungs. My friends are all ages because I never really distinguished between ages even when I was young. I had a friend when I was in my early thirties and I would describe someone to him and say "she is our age" and he would say, "you are 31 and I am 65; there is no 'our age'". I never thought it mattered; it was the soul of the person that was important, not the container that held that soul.

I have reached the age now where many of my family members were already gone and it seems incredulous to me that I have reached this point. I am trying to adjust my thinking to that of an older person; and I guess I have changed my thinking a bit because I know for sure that if this is to be the final chapter of my life then I really don't want to waste my time doing anything that makes life seem like it's tedious and not worth living. My job is very stressful and I have never been the kind of person that can just work in a job that I hate simply for the money but now I take it one step further. I ask myself that if this is my last day on earth, would I really want to spend it doing this. It has led me to start planning my next chapter and even though I don't have the means to officially retire, I do want to make a living that will give me the freedom to live where I want and have a bit of freedom to make sure that I can live my life fully up until it really is my last day on earth.

I have to say one thing; my life has never been very predictable and that suits me just fine. I am the type of person that is always sure there is one more good adventure around the corner and I hope to be able to take advantage of those adventures until I breathe my last breath. Getting old hopefully will have little impact on changing that trait.

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