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Is Age really just a number?

July 22, 2022 by wroolie Leave a Comment

“Age is just a number.” 

I hear that all the time. It usually is said by someone who is surprised to find out how old I am.  I’ll meet someone new, and we’ll be talking about something in pop culture, and I’ll mention a show or song from my youth that they never heard of.  This is when the age discrepancy comes out.  Sometimes, it’s in the decades!

And then, they’ll say, “well… age is just a number.”  It’s become so cliche that I hear it so often.  

But it isn’t just a number, is it?

I totally get what they are saying.  Just because you are a certain age doesn’t mean you should feel that age or act that age.  We all know people in their eighties who act like teenagers and people in their twenties who act like life is over.  I still feel like I’m figuring things out.  I feel like I haven’t become an adult just yet.

I guess the “age is just a number” phrase bothers me because it doesn’t need to be said.  It’s like the other person is trying to say something to console me when I don’t need consoling.  

I was watching some stupid movie on Netflix a few weeks ago.  It was called “The Secret: Dare to Dream” (I had to look it up because it was so mediocre).   A man was at a birthday party for a female friend of his. And she had a teenage daughter. The daughter was talking about s’mores and the man mentioned how he loved those. 

“How do you know about s’mores?”, the young girl asked.

“You don’t get to my age without having lived a little,” he said.  

I loved that.  You don’t get to my age without having lived a little.

To say age is just a number like saying the time on the clock is just a number.  It’s like saying the odometer on your car just displays a number.  It’s like saying the number on the scale is just a number.

I’m the first to admit that I freak out on milestone birthdays.  Next week I turn 50.  

When I turned thirty, I asked what I was doing with my life.  Everyone I spoke to who was over thirty talked about how I had nothing to worry about.  I wondered if I was on the right track.  Am I living my life to its fullest, etc.  Shortly afterwards, I started Overpass.  I stopped being a permanent employee.  I looked at people in the same job I was in at the time who had been there for twenty years and it scared me.  

When I turned forty, I freaked out again.  Overpass existed, but I really just did contracting with it. After years, I hadn’t really found any clients.   It wasn’t moving as fast as I hoped. Maybe I wasn’t taking it seriously enough.  And … forty?  That seemed like such a huge number.  That same year, I created my first app.  Later, I started the YouTube channel.  

That “just a number” is what forced me to push myself out of homeostasis.  It allowed me to evaluate where I was settling and to remember all the goals and dreams I had but stopped trying for.  I never feel like I’m over the hill or that life is over.  I’m just getting started. But it’s a nice time-check to let me know that I might be spending too much time on the things I’m not that interested in.

It’s funny how we always assume everyone else is the finish product but we are still a work in progress.  

I definitely feel like a work in progress. I wish I could wear a sign that says “under construction.  Please excuse my mess.”

I’m not done.  I plan on living a little.

And I look forward to my fifties.

Filed Under: Growing Up, My Life

Man, I hated PE!

March 28, 2012 by wroolie 1 Comment

Image by Steve A Johnson

When I was kid, the subject I hated most in school was PE.  Even in the seventh grade, it seemed like a barbarous hour in the middle of the school day where they forced us to put on sweaty clothes and compete in team sports.  Some kids were so competitive that it made the whole exercise unbearable.

The competitiveness was encouraged by the teachers (we called them coach—even though they taught History too).

I didn’t mind PE when it involved a non-competitive sports.  I liked running and solo exercises.  But, I was an exception.  Everyone else wanted to play a team sport, so that’s mostly what we did.  I went to 3 different junior highs and 3 high schools.  All of them were the same.  We played basketball, softball, and soccer mostly.  Occasionally, we would play tennis.

Here’s a typical PE class.  Everyone gets dressed and heads out to the blacktop (tarmac) to form up (very Army like).  We do a few stretches.  Then, the coach announces that we will be playing basketball today.  He chooses the two best basketball players as captains.  They each take turns choosing the rest of the class for their team.  The good players go first.  I was frequently last.  In fact, there was another kid who was sometimes chosen after me, but not all the time.
Then, we’d play an awkward game of basketball.  I say awkward because I would never actually want the ball.  It’s not easy running around the court trying to look like you are involved and helping the team, but constantly putting yourself behind the person guarding you so you would never get the ball.  I run around and wait to be called in to shower.

Showering in junior high was weird too.  No one wanted to do it, but it was a requirement.  They used to have a shower monitor who would give you a rubber band at the showers when you proved you were wet enough.  You couldn’t leave the locker room unless you had one.  So, we all did this thing where we would get undressed, wrap a towel around our waists, stand next to a running shower and cup our hands to splash ourselves with water.  I’ve never seen anyone actually get into the shower or remove the towel. No one ever got clean—that wasn’t the goal.  We did this to get the rubber band and get out of their and back to our normal school day.

It’s not that I don’t like exercise.  In the Army, we did physical training nearly every day.  But we never did team sports.

I have this inexplicable ability to get hit in the face with any ball I play with.  I’ve had basketballs bounced off my face.  I have been hit in the face with baseballs.  I even once hit a tennis ball with the corner of my racket and had it fly into my face.  I’m glad we never had bowling at school.

These accidents wouldn’t be so bad if I just laughed them off like other kids would, but I was an awkward teenager.  I never laughed anything off.  While others laughed at me, I just kept going like nothing had happened.

PE probably wouldn’t have been so bad if there were only boys in our class.  I embarrassed myself in front of everyone, but I started to get interested in girls at this age.  I would have liked it more if I could have humiliated myself only in front of the boys.

I can remember playing softball in PE.  I always went to my normal position from Little League – right field.  No one ever hits the ball there, and if they did, so one expected a super-human catch like you see in the major leagues.  So, you were mostly safe.  Once, the ball was hit straight to me.  I couldn’t even move to get it.  I was a slow fly ball that was destined for the exact spot I was standing in.  I put up my glove and the ball landed in it.  Now, this wasn’t my glove— it was a borrowed glove form the PE department, and the webbing was gone between the thumb and fingers.  So, the ball fell from my glove to the ground.  I quickly picked it up and threw it into the infield (anywhere in the infield—-just away from me!).  I looked over at a girl who I fancied—-her name as Jackie.  She looked at me with disgust and said “You ass!”  This was the longest conversation I ever had with her.  I looked at the ground and pretended I didn’t hear.  It was a better tactic than thinking about how a normal person would respond.

In school, the kids who were good at team sports were the most popular, even with the teachers.  It’s amazing to think about how much better they were treated than the kids who were good at academics (I wasn’t one of these either).  High School was worse than junior high, because the everyone was interested in how the school football team was doing.  To be on the football team meant you were one of the leaders. You were like a member of congress.  You could leave the school on a bus to some other school in North County for a game and no one would care that you missed class.

All through school, the teachers and parents make it a point of telling you that you need to attend school to get ready for the real world.  I’m having this own conversation with my kids now.  Well, I’m in the real world now, and there is no way I would ever go back there.

Filed Under: Bumblings, Growing Up, My Life

Happy Thanksgiving

November 25, 2010 by wroolie 1 Comment

Thanksgiving is a strange holiday for me.  To me, it’s like a holiday that used to be really important, but then everyone in the world stopped celebrating it. 

Of course, it’s just as important as it was when I was a kid, but in England it doesn’t exist.  I just got back from my morning run (still sweating) and just realised that today is Thanksgiving.  To the world around me, it’s a day like any other.

When I first moved here, I told myself that I would hold tightly to my American childhood.  I would cook a turkey every Thanksgiving and have fireworks every fourth of July.  Hell, maybe I’ll even hang a big ol’ American flag in front of my house like I did when I was living in a small town in Missouri.  My house was going to be like an U.S. Embassy—US soil in a foreign land.  Well, the zeal wore off years ago.  Life keeps moving on and you have to move on with it.

But then, again, I suppose Thanksgiving doesn’t have a hold on me just because I was born in a land that celebrates it.  Increasingly, maybe because of age, I find myself less concerned with who I was and more concerned with who I am.  When I sit in meditation, for example, I try to focus on the current moment and leave the past where it belongs—as a construct of my own memory.  In a sense, the Eric Wroolie who I identify myself with—the American kid who likes baseball and fast-food—doesn’t really exist at all.  I have only what I have now.  Even the America I remember changes every time I go back—so I identify more with a memory than with the reality.  But I’m definitely not English—the accent always gets in the way.  In a way, the “nationality” of things is really unimportant.  Whoa, didn’t mean to try to get deep here—it must be the running high.

Well, anyway, happy Thanksgiving to all my family and friends back in the States.  Today for me will be a day like any other day, but I will occasionally stop and remember that today is actually a holiday and I will think about my family coming together back home.

Filed Under: Growing Up, Living in the UK

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