Ageist depression can occur at any age and stage of life; some feel too old, whilst others feel far too young and inexperienced to make an impact in their or others’ lives.
Despite our age, let us acknowledge this:
We are forever young: God sees each of us as forever young. We never outgrow being children of God. Age is merely a barrier of vanity.
The desire to be forever young—or old or experienced enough to be respected—is a perfectly natural, normal yearning.
As the years advance, and with grace we take our age in acceptance, we can still know the safe assurance—we never outgrow God.
Whether we like it or not, despite our ailing bodies, we are forever young—of spirit.
Even as our minds fog up due to underuse or misuse, the capacity of our soul never diminishes; indeed, the maturing of the years merely tempers our brash hardness.
The One Aspect of Ourselves That Questions Our Real Age
As is alluded to above, it is the age of our spirits—if we can even understand them as having an age—that truly quantifies our age. (But, what is eternal has no age.)
The body, whilst it does decay, and the mind, whilst it does take time to mature, and of itself decays in our twilight years or through lack of use, these both are not our true us—they, both, are just vehicles to the transportation of the real us to our world, and that world to us.
We use the body and the mind to achieve an end—the living of mortal life. Without the body and the mind we cannot live mortally, but without spirit—our very soul—we cannot live at all.
Age, therefore, truly is one of the great veneers of vanity we will ever know; it is the brokenness inside each of us that mourns for youth or the respect of maturity—whenever there is a perception we don’t have the one we seek.
Going Beyond Age
If we believe what we have read—that God, in his wisdom, has sought to give us eternal souls—and there is no reason not to, we can so easily go beyond our age, and think and feel from a basis that comes from beyond age; that reclaims any memory and any hope and sees both past and future from the present-tense context.
That is, to see the entire flow of life as a plane along the lines of eternity.
When we go beyond age, for ourselves and others, we look into the essence of eternity; God has our interest and our inspiration. We see, with immediacy, all of life as it is. Age, as we think and feel, is a thief, but only if we allow such larceny.
© 2011 S. J. Wickham.
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