You are Only as Old as You Think You are

Physically you may well feel tired some days and those old photographs don’t exactly help to change your perception of the fact that you are now much older than you were before.

But, it is only a matter of being able to adjust yourself mentally so that you can feel you are only as old as you think you are. I know you are saying to yourself, that’s easily said but how would I do that?

Take my mother as an example, she was continuously full of a youthful enthusiasm and would laugh and smile all of the time. She enjoyed life to the full with my father and the nine children that she had brought into this world.

So why was this? How could my mother have so easily managed to have this incredible attitude to her life, considering that she had such a huge responsibility for all the children that were dependant on her?

Surely such a burden of responsibility would have made her age before her time and although obviously there would be some great memorable moments as the children were growing up, her body would have tired.

Yes, my mother did take the physical toll of such a huge responsibility, but she had adjusted herself mentally to be able to cope with it all and still feel good about herself and the life that she lived.

My mother was born in a leap year on February 29, that meant that she could only really celebrate her birthday when the next leap year would come, which was every four years.

She decided that she would not celebrate or count her birthdays that would occur in the years in between the leap years. In this simple way she firmly fixed in her mind an age for her that would only relate to the number of leap year birthdays.

You can imagine the excitement in the household when that leap year birthday occurred. My mother would act like a young girl with all of the spontaneous enthusiasm that she could exhibit.

After all she had patiently waited for the years in between to go by and now she was really going to celebrate her mental age birthday with all of her family around her.

Because of this mental adjustment that my mother had made regarding her age, her constant thoughts would be as if she was younger than her physical looks portrayed.

She would tell everybody, you are only as old as you think you are.

When my wonderful mother passed from this world it was just before she would have celebrated her twenty first birthday, in her mental age calculations. I will leave you to work out what her physical age was.