Ever since I was young I have believed the number of someone’s age signified something. I’ve always taken it very seriously, being astonished at how someone is despite their age, always an age I never am. What could these numbers signify considering they are abstract, is age abstract? I believe it’s the trouble that age doesn’t mean anything, that there is no way to qualify the duration of time relative to mine except through quantifiable measurements. Nothing about numbered time is real, we stagnate time to look and rely on all of time, yet life does not live in digits.
I guess this is truly a me problem, an easy attempt to simulate my disappointment in others without them knowing. It’s an a priori judgement on the durational quality of someone else’s life. Or more aptly, the inability to deal with the relational differences in duration I cannot account for in the duration holding our lives together in the present. Ridiculous, I’m positing that my duration is already accounted for in the other persons age, there’s not in mine. I say, “your age means nothing to me!”, which I now understand is a meaningless tantrum but nonetheless interests me because age still means something and this is what it’s always meant to me. It makes less sense to me to celebrate birthdays and respond when someone asks, “how do you feel at 21?”. Either I came in advance to my age or my age predates me, a false dichotomy. The latter is literally the possibility of my life, I therefore cannot speak upon the time I’ve lived without simultaneously assuming myself dead.
Numbers fail to hold the ages of life if age has quality, we don’t live in ages of life when there is no life preceding our own. I’m not suggesting ages are necessary, it is rather just a nice idea to know there is no time waiting for you, to be temporally positioned amongst those life is shared with. However, it’s probably best that it’s not, time is highly flexible and we can create times between each other more unique than we could know amidst eternity.
