By Ashley Surber
My religion professor spoke to my class recently, and she told us something that I had never quite grappled with prior. She said that, at our age, as college-aged students, we have yet to hit the stage in our lives (a stage of maturity) where we truly feel that we will pass from this place. That at age 30 or so we “feel it in our bones.”
To clarify this a little more, she explained that there is a pattern in the age of the most significant holy ones in various religious traditions, Christianity, Buddhism, etc, where they do not become “enlightened” or fully equipped to go and teach until this ripe age of 30, yes 30.
If I’m being truthful, I kind of sat there in question and thought about it for the remainder of the class. How can I feel indestructible for the first 20 or so years of my life and then all of a sudden, death is awaiting me at my door? This is quite dramatic, I realize. But to simplify it, would be to say that we lead ourselves to believe that life is somehow this countdown. What really struck me is why people rarely see it from the other way around, as a journey to a beautiful destination, and not a countdown to a “the end.”
Now, if you really think hard on this concept, like I have you may start to recognize the stereotypes we suspend over the stages of our lives and what we consider to be “old” per se. You have your childhood, your adolescents, then early adulthood, the settled down phase, empty nest phase, maybe a mid life crisis thrown in there somewhere and then retirement. How many of you solely think of your teens and 20s as years of freedom and exploration? How many of you see your 30s and 40s as years to “settle down” and then we have deemed the after 50 mark as, look at you, you’re almost there!!! Pat on the back! Again, I ask myself, why do we let ourselves think in this way, and why do we gauge value due to our numerical value, that we so easily define ourselves by? We are mostly taught to take life by the reigns in our youth, we consider practicality in our middle stage and then to go into some sort of preparation mode after we are deemed a senior citizen.
Not to say that the end of this life should be the climax, but you should be living as if it is. You are only outwardly youthful for so long, yes, but your soul is ageless, and that is something at times we forget. I don’t want to be told that once I hit 30 that my soul will start to feel differently, if anything I can only hope that it is even more invigorated than it is now, because as we age we should be living proof of our growth, of our success, of our personal prosperity, not feeling sorry for ourselves that we are one year closer to older days.
We were created to be more than flesh and bone and whatever else our miraculous body is made up of, so why do we tend to conform to this idea that as our body decays our minds and souls do to? As long as you are alive, you are living. I can only hope that maybe you can stop thinking in terms of “we are all technically dying anyways” and adjust your mindset to “we are all growing anyways,” in whatever way that means for you. Take life by the reigns now and don’t let go.