ageless inside

“I am all the ages I have ever been.”

- Anne Lamott

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When I was 30 years old and a longtime New Yorker, I was visiting family in the Midwest. My niece and my cousin’s daughter (both around age 10) asked me to ride bikes with them. I eagerly joined in, hopping on a bike that belonged to another kid in the family.

I followed the girls along a country road in rural Indiana. We were a hearty trio, pedaling in unison under a big summer sky. As we got further and further from my cousin’s house, approaching an intersection, I shouted a question to my cousin’s daughter who was way ahead of me on her bike. “Mary! How far are we allowed to go?”

Mary slowed her bike down and came to a stop. My niece and I stopped our bikes, too, so we could all have a little convo. “How far are we allowed to go?” I asked again.

Mary scrunched her face in confusion. “Well, if you’re with us, we can go as far as we want. Because you’re a grown-up.”

“Oh, right,” I said. I felt my heart sink. Up until that moment, since hopping on that bike, I had completely and totally forgotten that I was 30 years old.

Mary and my niece started pedaling again, moving along that country road with me following after. But we weren’t a trio anymore. I’d been put in my place as a responsible adult so I started saying things like, “Be careful!” “Watch out for that gravel!” “Slow down, girls!”

Acting my age made that bike ride way less fun.

Age is amorphous and yet we, in our society, use it as a marker of identity and conformity. We are burdened by stereotypes and assumptions about what it means to be fifteen or forty or “in her seventies” or whatever that number may be.

But I have close friends, born decades before me, who truly seem like my peers. I’ve had incredible conversations with wise people who weren’t born until the 21st century. What my own age feels like on any given afternoon can vacillate wildly.

Maybe it’s because we’re all ageless on the inside.

How old do you feel today?

my ageless pal flying high on a swing, Katonah NY