A NUMBER OF OPTIONS

So tomorrow is a big number for me on the birthday scale, at least it seemed big back when I was a teenager.  Back then, to me a woman in their mid-fifties had permed, gray hair, wore stretch pants, and dangled with one foot in the grave.

Do I ever feel that way?  Well, there are days, but luckily, very few so far. But enough about me, let's take a look at some people who've "thought outside their age-box."

How about endurance swimmer Diana Nyad?  At sixty-four, she accomplished what very few could do, no matter their age.  Her fifty-three hour swim from Cuba to Florida would've knocked out just about any twenty-year-old. What a woman!

Or Laura Ingalls Wilder, who published her first book at age sixty-four (see, I'm young by her standards!) 

And Nelson Mandela was seventy-five when elected president of South Africa.

Now let's have a gander at the Rolling Stones.  If you'd have asked them when they started performing if they thought they'd still be hopping around on stage fifty years later, they'd have laughed in your face and said they wouldn't even be alive fifty years later.  Yet, here they are, rockin away!

Then there's the other end of the spectrum - children absorb so much at such a young age, learning more now because we no longer assume they're too young (to read, do math, learn a second language...) Our expectations have changed over the years now that we understand what sponges their young brains are.

Look at Louis Braille, who was a teenager when he invented the raised dots system, known as Braille, and became a teacher of Braille at nineteen.

Jaylen Bledsoe, fifteen, started his own tech company that specializes in web design and IT services, when he was thirteen.  His company is now worth about $3.5 million.

When Ryan Hreljac was six and heard about children in Africa walking long distances to get water, he raised money to build a well for them.  A year later, Ryan's first well was built. Over a dozen years later, Ryan's Well Foundation has completed nearly 700 projects.

If someone told these people they were too young to accomplish great things, they obviously didn't listen.  Good for them!  Do we let the numbers on our driver's license dictate our accomplishments, our dreams, our lives?

Is it all based on what we perceive our life should be at a certain age?  For example, I don't think I had envisioned hosting both pimples and chin hairs at age fifty-five! (What?  Was that TMI?)

So, I'm curious (yes, I've been told I ask too many questions!) If you had amnesia and someone asked how old you felt you were, what would you say?  And why?