Our age is a curious thing. On the surface it seems like it should be really quite universal and absolute. After all, 25 years is 25 years, right?
I am not so sure anymore.
I am quickly coming up on my 28th birthday. That seems pretty straight forward. On that day I will have been alive for 10,227 days. Anyone with the same birth date as me will have been alive for the exact same amount of time. I mean, how much more objective can you get?
So why is age so subjective?
Granted, actual chronological age isn't. It is exactly what it says it is. But the meaning behind that number, the connotation can vary so widely as to make that number lose virtually all meaning. Different situations, different people will all influence that number in different ways, sometimes almost to a dizzying extent.
Most of the time I feel 27, just what I am. Still pretty young, but far enough along in life to be at the point where my life should have some good, solid direction. But there are experiences I go through on a daily basis that really alter that. When I am at the hospital, working away, taking care of my patients, in the OR, rounding with my team I really am 27.
But then we start to talk.
And that is when you can just throw our chronological ages right out the window. They begin to lose so much of their meaning. We start to conceptualize age in terms of life experiences, and with my med school classmates that starts to make me feel old. Really old.
I know, I know, there are plenty of you who will remind me that I am still pretty young, and I thank you in advance for that. But when compared to many of my contemporaries (ie. second year med students) I really am old! I promise! I have been living on my own away from my parents for 10 years now, easily twice that of many of my fellow students. And even many of them, while living away, still really subsisted off their parents. Sure, my folks helped out some, they certainly didn't leave me high and dry, but I really have been independent of them since I graduated high school. No big feat, but not something many of my classmates, with their very well to do physician and lawyer parents are used to. Throw in the fact that I lived a couple years in a foreign country and took a year off after undergraduate school and that just compounds the difference
And then take into account the family, and, well, some of them treat me like some old uncle rather than "one of them". I don't really mind, but sometimes the deference offered me due to some misconception that I am "older and wiser" than they is actually quite irritating. I try to be flattered, but I can tell that many of them see the difference in our ages as much more than the 4-5 years it really is.
But it works the other way as well.
Just last week I had spring break. Of course my wife still had to teach lessons and our oldest still had pre-school, so rather than heading to the beach and living wild and crazy it meant I got to stay home and do stuff with them. And that was fine with me. I didn't feel I was missing out on anything, in fact I even relished the opportunity to take Jessica to pre-school.
And there I felt like an infant.
Really, I did. It was bizarre to go from feeling so much older than those around me to feeling so out of place for being so young. The other parents there just seemed to me to be of an entirely different generation than I. And while some of them just might be, most aren't. Most are only 5-10 years older than me. But they have been working that much longer, with the much nicer vehicles to show for it. And while some of this can be attributed to the fact that I am taking my oldest to pre-school with their youngest it is still an odd feeling. I am not used to feeling like the young one, and I kind of like it. In that setting I wasn't the old uncle, I was the younger cousin who was just starting down the same path as those before me.
Yet I am still 27 years old. That never changed. But the perceptions of those around me, as well as my own, of what those 27 years means changes nearly every day.