Some skeptics thought Winston and I were too old to be starting new careers… Were they right?
Former baseball star Satchel Paige once said, “How old would you be, if you didn’t know how old you were?” A spry friend of mine nearing his one-hundredth birthday told me age is only relative.
How often have you heard, “Aren’t you too old to do that?” The appropriate answer, he maintained, is “How old do I think I am?”
My friend bragged that he had seven different ages, and he liked them all: chronological age, biological age, social age, mental age, physical age, psychological age and sexual age. His way of thinking helped Winston and I have the guts to give up our “stuff,” move to a grass hut and try new adventurous careers when we were almost fifty years old. And we never looked back.
Your chronological age is how many times you’ve sat on the earth while the earth orbits the sun, the number of years you have lived. To me it seems one of the least important ages to calculate.
Your biological age is the age of your body’s systems: the beginning of puberty; the increase (and decrease) in hormones; the health of your liver, the strength of your heart.
Your social age encompasses when you marry, become parents, become grandparents, graduate college, start a career, retire. People speed up or slow down their social clock at will.
Your mental agerelates to your intellectual and emotional intelligence. An intellectually gifted child can be emotionally immature, and so can we.
Your physical age can be defined by lifestyle factors including diet, exercise, smoking, your home environment and your workplace. It’s your biological age compared to your chronological age.
Your psychological age is your emotional maturity and logic level, your ability to learn and remember coupled with your ability to handle and manage your feelings.
Your sexual age—My almost century-old friend quoted J. Stephen Jones, MD, FACS, a urologist with the Cleveland Clinic. “Staying frisky is more about physical and mental health and the strength of your relationship than it is about age.”
The age that really matters: How old do I feel?
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