Years ago, under circumstances I do not remember, I was walking down a hall to meet an older gentleman who was approaching me slowly on a walker. With a grin on his face he said to me, “In my mind I am running.” At the time I laughed along with him, but it is not until now, when I have reached his age, that I really understand what he meant.
For instance, ask me about Switzerland. I lived there for a year, and have many memories and opinions on my stay. Yet there is one problem with those memories. I was ten when I lived there. These are ten-year-old memories that I have, and are certainly not the recollections I might have had I lived there as an adult. Yet they are part of me, and inside I feel no different than that younger me that walked the streets of Lausanne on the way to school, or viewed the Alps, or ate delicious chocolate bars.
My early married years were spent during the Vietnam War with a husband in a Marine uniform. I am still that person, and while I intellectually might be able to discuss that conflict, my mind is still seared by the upheaval of that time. I feel no different than that person whose children were not allowed to play with neighboring children because their father was serving in Vietnam.
You look at me, an older woman pushing a cart in the grocery store, and make conclusions about me because of my stage in life. Yet inside I am still the same person who pushed that grocery cart holding a baby with a wandering two-year-old under my watchful eye. My peers and I are not defined by our wrinkles, our walkers, our graying hair or our uncertain steps. For better or worse we are the accumulation of all we have been, and all the experiences we have had. We are our minds, not our bodies, and in our minds we are ageless.