Rachna Vinod
“When I was of your age, I did this or that.” “That’s fine. I’ll do that when I’m of your age. But for now, I’ll do what my age demands.” This conversation, common across generations, reflects the perceived disconnect between them, often leading to misunderstandings, conflicts, and detachment. The debate typically centres on two key issues: is this a communication failure, or is it an inevitable outcome of the generation gap?
Age is a wonderfully confusing thing. It behaves almost like Wi-Fi-everybody claims to understand it, but it fluctuates depending on where you stand and how many obstacles are in between. It has a funny habit, it always appears older on other people’s faces and younger in our own selfies. There are only two things people never agree on-politics and age. One tells you too much about others, the other tells you too much about yourself. Age does not reveal itself through wrinkles-it reveals itself through reactions. The more you look at age, the less it behaves like a number and more like a mood.
Let’s take a stroll through this delightful contradiction.
If you ask children their age, you will get an answer full of confidence and decimals. “I’m six and a half!” Sometimes even six and three-quarters. They treat age as a trophy, the more they have, the closer they believe they are to becoming superheroes. They live in the future. They treat age like a badge – the more numbers you collect, the more privileges you earn. Staying up late, climbing higher swings… age is an exciting elevator going only upward. But along the staircase of adulthood, something mysterious happens. The numbers don’t sound like achievements anymore; those start sounding like warnings. And honestly, who can blame them? For children, growing older means more freedom, more height, more ability to reach biscuit jars. In childhood, age is a race forward.
Somewhere between school homework and financial slips, the arithmetic quietly flips. By the time we become adults, age stops being something we announce. It becomes a tug-of-war between acceptance and denial. Age listens to emotions, not calendars. If age were truly a matter of calendars, everyone born in the same year would feel identical. Our inner age shifts. Sometimes it leaps. Sometimes it crawls. But it always listens to the story we are telling ourselves. And then there’s the comedy of how others see us. It’s comic, really-everyone feels younger than someone, and older than someone else. Age is relative, a sliding scale depending on who is looking and how you feel that day. But there are magical days too-days when everything aligns, when a breeze, a song, or a message from an old friend lifts your mood so high that even a seventy-year-old feels twenty again. In those moments, age obeys emotion, not chronology. Everything aligns, and you feel astonishingly young. Something inside you leaps like a child discovering a new playground.
Some people grow old fast-not because of years, but because they stop being curious. Others remain young simply because they remain interested. They laugh easily, make new friends without hesitation, try new things without worrying how they might look while doing them. They understand that youth is not a period of life but a style of thinking. If the mind is a window, then curiosity is the breeze that keeps it fresh.
Nature, meanwhile, carries no such anxieties. Trees do not announce, “I’ve turned fifty, no more flowering for me.” Rivers do not pause to consider that they’ve been flowing for thousands of years. The sun and the moon rise every morning and evening, looking ever fresh and new, in spite of the fact that it has done so billions of times before. Nature grows, rests, renews, bends, blossoms, and simply continues. Perhaps the universe whispers a quiet message. Age becomes heavy only when we carry it as a burden. Worn lightly, it becomes experience. The most inspiring people are the ones who people defy age-not in denial, but in delight. They treat age as a companion, not a constraint. They grow, not just grow older.
Youth and old age are not opposites. They are merely attitudes. When we think with flexibility, kindness, humour, and hope-we stay young. When we cling to rigidity, fear, and the illusion of control-we age faster. The calendar measures time. The world measures achievements. But only you can measure your life. That is the secret to grow, not just to grow older. To age, but not to become age. The Lightness in Accepting Time. To stay light. To laugh at ourselves. To embrace our days with interest instead of anxiety. To greet grey hair as experience, not defeat. To understand that wrinkles are not failures-they are maps of emotions, weathered beautifully. Because experience grows, curiosity renews, wonder revives. Numbers may grow old, but thoughts are born new every morning. After all, age is inevitable, but growing old is optional.
Each generation carries its own rhythms-its favourite songs and slang, its anxieties shaped by different crises, its rituals born from different technologies. One learns to wait for letters and landline calls, another grows up with typing indicators and disappearing messages. One remembers the world before the internet, another cannot imagine a world without it. These differences, often dismissed as gaps, are simply variations in the music of time. Our values, our humour, our ideas of responsibility and freedom-all of them are coloured by the era that raised us. No wonder we sometimes misread each other. Yet beneath these mismatched interpretations lies the same human wish; to be understood, to be seen without the filter of “too young” or “too old.”
“Your age, my age” is a wonderfully elastic little formula stretching and shrinking depending on our mood, our health, our hopes, even the kind of friends we have around us. Age is funny like that. There will always be someone older who insists we’re still “just kids,” and someone younger who looks at us as if we’re ancient history. And in between these two judgments, all of us at your age, my age, her age, his age, whatever age, are simply searching for a small nod of recognition, a quiet acknowledgement that we make sense. Each generation is shaped by its own technologies, its own crises, its own fashions and freedoms. The only age is the one we choose to feel. The one we carry inside us like a private season. After all, age is mostly a matter of thoughts. And thoughts are never in need of anti-wrinkle cream.
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