Utterly Smitten

Do you guys ever get anxiety about growing older/aging? Since college, I feel like time has just been slipping by and even I can’t believe I’m already 27 years old now! It feels like yesterday I was just 22 and starting my first full-time job, and it seriously feels like yesterday I was just 23 and moving away for grad school….

I’ve always been aware of aging since I was very young. When I was 8 or 9, my fourth grade teacher had a minor heart attack that left us with a substitute teacher for almost two months. After he returned, he gave a passionate speech about how precious the time in your life is and how the hours and minutes and seconds that go by will never be yours again. Even then it felt like a heavy talk for us kids to grasp, but it stayed with me. However, it made me very sensitive about time and very anxious about how little control I had over it…when I turned 10, I knew that I would never be a single-digit age again, and when I first started high school, I distinctly remember thinking to myself that I would come to this place at 14 and I would leave it at 18, and that was a fact. In college, I was genuinely sad on my 20th birthday because I would never, ever be a teen again and it was so bewildering to know that these phases of my life could just move on without me, whether or not I was ready to move on as well…

But then, a couple of years ago, I came to the realization that aging is the best proof that we are indeed alive. Once that clicked for me, I felt such a great sense of freedom from worrying about the passage of time; instead, I started to see aging as a gift and I understood that my fourth grade teacher’s lesson to us was gratitude for time. When I came across the quote above today, it once again struck me how lucky each of us are to be able to get older every day, and what a privilege that truly is. On a related note, I also remember having a talk with a friend long ago that we wouldn’t plan for milestones in our lives, such as the age we’ll get married or the age we’ll have kids; instead, we would just always be the perfect age for wherever we were in life. (And really, what’s the fun in having everything planned out?)

How do you guys feel about getting older? Do you worry, do you not care? What matters most to you at this point in your life? I’d love to hear your thoughts. :)

{photos of Paul Newman & Joanne Woodward via}