What’s Age Got To Do With It?

How fast another year has gone, and just like that I’m a year older!

“What’s Age Got To Do With It?” is a post to encourage you not to tie an age to your progress. At some point, we all get caught up with what a 21 year old “should be doing”, or what we should have accomplished by 25 years old, etc.

Like every young girl, I had dreams of what I thought my life will pan out to be. Married at 21 and children by 25. LOL! I can’t even fathom doing any of those right now and I’m past 25.

Life doesn’t come with a blue print or road map and it’s left for us to make discerning choices that will ultimately affect our future. Bad choices will leave us with lessons to be learnt and their consequences, and the right ones will propel us forward. So what has age got to do with it? We can argue that with age comes knowledge and experience, but it’s never to be a judge of where we should be in life or what we should have done already.

A little example from my life, at 9 years old I was preparing for the common entrance exams to get into secondary school and by the time I was 10 years old, I had skipped year 6 and was in my first year of junior secondary school. Forward a couple of years later, before my sixteenth birthday I was done with secondary school and getting ready to start university. If age was a given, I should have started uni at 16 and finished at 19 years but life often has its surprises and I ended up starting uni when I was 21 years(I had several gap years and had to study in college first for another 2 years when I got to the UK). Can you see the big difference? I was devastated at the time because the delays were beyond my control and not because I didn’t have the right grades, etc.

What that experience taught me was that age has got nothing to do with it. Because while I was upset to have been going to uni much later than I had anticipated, I also had a few course mates who were actually much older and returning to education. The fact is that everyone’s got their path in life and in as much as we humans have set up most things to go according to ones age, it is never a given for everyone and thus, we must not compare ourselves with others.

I sometimes have those low days when I think, well look at X, she’s the same age as me and look at what she’s accomplished. However, I know nothing of what X had gone through in order to get where she is, so why the comparison? If anything, I follow others now to inspire me to continue to tirelessly work on my dreams rather than a source to demotivate me or cause negative comparisons. They say comparison is the thief of joy, and that’s so right!

How old you are right now doesn’t matter as long as you’re honest with yourself and working on your goals. Being happy within yourself is what matters the most at the end of the day.