Milestone birthdays

We’ll start with the joke today, because this set me thinking.

The meaning of success:

At age   4 success is not peeing in your pants

At age 12 success is having friends

At age 16 success is having a driving licence

At age 20 success is having sex

At age 35 success is having money

At age 50 success is having money

At age 60 success is having sex

At age 70 success is having a driving licence

At age 80 success is having friends

At age 90 success is not peeing in your pants

Why do those milestone birthdays seem to mean so much to us?  It’s a bit like my weight issue recently when one extra pound more made it one extra stone!  It was horrendous and yet an extra pound below the stone mark didn’t have anywhere near the same impact as actually hitting that stone mark and the shock when the scales showed something totally different to what you have been seeing for a long long time.  I suppose it only has the same impact on the few countries that actually use stones and pounds.  In the US they just use pounds, in other countries they use kilogrammes and although I suppose going over the 0, from 80 to 90 for instance can be frustrating I don’t think it can have quite the same shock factor as what seem like going up another stone.  Annoying and exasperating, but it was still just a pound whereas the next stone up is horrific. 

With age, when we are 39 years and 11 months old it is nowhere near as bad as when we are 40 and one month old.  We have these preconceived ideas about what a 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80 and 90 year old is like and it changes as we reach those milestones to a certain extent but we still never want to reach one.  It is not so much that we feel older in ourselves but it is the idea that we have now got to that horrific next milestone.  When we are young 50 seems ancient, even when we are in our 30’s it does but as we gradually get there it doesn’t seem quite so old after all as some of our friends will have already got to 50, but it still doesn’t mean that we want to be there.  We also have this preconceived idea of grannies being old ladies with shawls round their shoulders wearing slippers with pom-poms on the front and sitting in a rocking chair – now how many of those do you know these day?.  If anything they are the great grandma’s these days but we also know very sprightly 80 or 90 year olds who are nothing like that.  Age has changed over the years, the kids mature younger and the oldies stay younger longer, or so it seems to me.

Anyway more tomorrow as my brain is getting tired from just thinking about it J