Iam 40 years old, have lost all my youth working hard and trying to be a good parent and now I find that I have forgotten how it feels to be young and alive again. My friends tell me to “behave my age”… whatever that means. What exactly does it mean? Have I lost out in life?

A father in distress
Never behave your age, whatever that means. Meaning that you are as old as life itself and there is something in you that doesn’t ever die, simply because that which gave life to your unborn self wasn’t your parents having furtive sex in a bedroom but there was something a billion years beyond the recent sheet shaking — something that sparked off life itself. And that which sparked off life was above and beyond life or it couldn’t have done what it did.
Breathing life to inert molecules of water, carbon and oxygen etc., forming chains of atoms millions of lines long, molecules alive and twirling, coded with complexities the so-called “mapping of the human genome” doesn’t even begin to fathom. All eventually making the guy called you, warts, pimples, freckles and all... and therefore you wouldn’t be here alive and kicking on this beautiful planet today reading my column if it hadn’t been for that something timeless that is and was always beyond life. So stop behaving your age whatever that means.
Stop behaving your age for more earthy reasons too. The calendar can never measure your so-called age. The calendar is just a piece of paper with some figures on it. It’s supposed to be sacrosanct and infallible as far as your body is concerned but in truth it’s a silly document. I’ll show you hundreds of 50-year-olds who are fitter, stronger and faster than a million 20-year-olds. To them the calendar means nothing. It’s at best a marker of time that watches and clocks measure, not a measure of time the body watches and clocks inside you. So stop behaving your age, whatever that means.
Get earthier. Get inside yourself. If you have lived happily so far, without hangups and time warps, if you never felt those emotional free falls into limbo, where time stopped for you in some traumatic moment and the rest of life was a just a sporadic twitching of sorts — so many of us have felt the rapid freeze and slow painful thaw when some trauma snapped our future and stole our past. If you never yet felt those tremors rock your being — and I hope you never do — you’ll find that “you” alive and happy, and you’ll find yourself belonging to all age groups — living inside yourself right now.
You can, if you really want, pull out a ten-year-old like a rabbit from a magician’s hat right now, this very instant... or a five-year-old for that matter. You can think and feel like a 15-year-old, zapping your hormones as you kissed a girl for the very first time. “You” of all age groups are always available to you at all times. Or at least you should be. Even if you are a 40-year-old, you should be able to locate a wiser and smarter guy who is 50 living inside you.
The future is just as available as the past, bro. Every age and time lives and breathes on inside always. If your friends want to be in a time warp, let them be. It’s high time YOU stop living your age… whatever that means.