What’s my age again?

Today’s daily prompt is questioning whether or not age is something to be mindful of.

“Age is just a number,” says the well-worn adage. But is it a number you care about, or one you tend (or try) to ignore?

I believe in the idea that age is just a number and I often try to live my life as if my age doesn’t matter, because in the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t. However there are definitely times where I look at my life and I have to re-evaluate the path my life is on and if I need to steer things in a different direction due to my age. The only important matter I can think of at this present time, is the matter of having children. Being a woman, there are more complications in being pregnant and giving birth etc as you get older. Quite often I live my life as if I am still 21, and a lot of the time I truly feel and believe that I am still that young. While I still am quite young (in my opinion, as I am 26 now), there are days that I begin to stress out that my biological clock is ticking and I should start thinking about when I would want to have kids – to which there is a slight problem as I am currently (and have been for a while) single. That doesn’t bother me a great deal in general, but it just becomes a bit of an obstacle when I consider the option of kids sometime. But I guess I still have plenty of time to figure all of that out.
I also have days when I look at the people I’m at uni with and I begin to feel disappointed that I am so much older than the majority of them doing an undergraduate degree, but I just have to keep reminding myself that all our journeys are different and I have some amazing experiences that I did after high school which some of these kids wouldn’t have had yet, or maybe even at all. So, for that I have to be thankful and to be mindful that just because I’m older, doesn’t mean I’m a failure.

On the other hand, looking at ages, there are some people who are well and truly “old souls” and their physical age doesn’t match their mental age, so in that regard I think it’s easy to believe that age is really just a number that doesn’t mean a whole lot. I read this article the other day on ‘Signs that you’re an old soul’, which I believe is about reincarnation – but I won’t get into that here, again. While I stated above that I still feel like I’m 21 most days, I also believe that I have a bit of an old soul. So I think the concept of “age” is something that really only matters in the materialistic/legal world that society dictates, for example things like schooling, drinking, driving, marriage, gambling, etc.

I think people are only as old as they feel. But there are different forms of feeling “old”, it could be physical, mental, emotional, etc. The actual “age” you are, shouldn’t matter a great deal when it comes to matters of the heart – whether it be relationships, family or friends, it’s the connection you have with people is the only thing that should matter (within reason of course, which I shouldn’t need to explain).

I don’t think I’ve conveyed how I wanted to say this very well, but I’m listening to distracting music and my eyes are beginning to close for a few seconds longer than my usual blink, so my apologies.