by Jennifer Fleming

Created on: January 09, 2009

When we are children we refer to it as growing up. I'm not sure at what point we make the transition from growing up to growing old but I suspect it begins somewhere in our mid twenties. Suddenly the birthdays don't seem as fun and the aches and pains some of us begin to feel are a constant reminder that we are all grown up.

I suppose that being out of school and working and living in the "real world" doesn't help much either. If we could always spend our summers playing games with our friends, staying over at other kids' houses and just hanging out, having fun then life would be swell right to the end. Unfortunately at some point we all have to move out of our parents homes and get jobs to pay the rent and other bills that begin to creep into our lives. Then one day, we step wrong and take a nasty fall leaving us with permanent pain in one of our appendages, perhaps even arthritis to look forward to.

In my life, I have taken quite a few painful spills, having taken after my Aunt Karen. I managed to break a foot once, sprain an ankle four times, and a wrist twice all before age 30. I started my thirties by spraining my knee and then following that up by breaking my wrist and then reinjuring it a year later. In my defense, I was 6 months pregnant when I fell and reinjured the wrist. Everyone knows pregnant women can't help being clumsy. I still have most of my thirties to go and one of my goals is not to break, strain or sprain anything. I'll let you know how that one turns out.

Something I find intriguing about growing old is how other people tend to view the subject. My dad says growing old isn't so bad, it's the damned decrepit part that sucks so badly. Young people always think anyone in their twenties or older is "middle age" or just plain "old". When my niece was about thirteen she met one of my coworkers, who was twenty-seven. Later, when she told me about meeting him and was describing him to me (because she couldn't remember his name) she referred to him as middle age. This sparked my curiosity because as far as I knew none of the people she had met that day were anywhere near middle age. So I asked her what she thought middle age was and she said, "I don't know, twenty-five"

As a result of this conversation I began to ask other people what they thought middle age was. Of the people that I asked, I found that the older a person is the older middle age becomes. When one friend told me he thought middle age was about thirty-five, his current age, I asked him how long he expected to live. He replied that he would probably make it to 85 or so, if he was lucky. Those numbers just don't add up. If middle age is thirty-five then you should top out around seventy. Another friend said he would consider middle age to be forty, he just isn't buying that "fifty is the new forty" and he hoped he would be lucky enough to make it to eighty.

I have set a goal to live to be 125. This means that I don't have to worry about middle age until my early sixties and if I actually make it to that age I would have lived to see three centuries. Pretty cool, huh? With new developments and discoveries being made everyday in the health field this goal seems more and more reasonable everyday. Of course, even I know that anything can happen, and I may die tomorrow. That's okay too because I can't be right all the time but it doesn't hurt to be optimistic!

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