Everyday is someone’s birthday. Many someone’s. With a world population of nearly 8 billion people, one day has an average of nearly 22,000,000 birthdays. 22,000,000. That’s a lot of cake and ice cream. That would be like everyone in the entire state of Florida all having the same birthday. 22,000,000 million birthday cakes all lit up at the same time. 53,625 square miles land area of lighted candles. A luminescence Las Vegas couldn’t hold a proverbial candle to.

The average lifespan of an American is just over 77 years. My dad live 11 years beyond that. My mother passed 17 years before that age. But they both lived full lives. They experienced, and recovered from, the traumas of their individual childhoods. They worked almost their entire adult lives, raise children, met their grandchildren, developed hobbies, established grown up friendships, and created homes. Their arrival into life was marked by the day of their birth. Their demise came when it came. There was no preset notion or plan. They lived. They died.

I am older than my mother ever was, but not as old as my father grew to be. But if I don’t see another tomorrow, no one could say I didn’t live a full life. I am younger than almost all of my siblings and healthier than all of them. We have all lived complete lives. But I don’t see my life reflected in theirs. Age, and time, has taken a high toll on them.

Aging is not for the weak or faint of heart. Regardless of the baseline of health I live with, time will always exact a price. My heart has known profound loss and heartbreak. My body has reminds me daily that mature reticence has replaced youthful exuberance. My joints speak the language regret. But everyday I wake up, get up and make whatever new adjustment time has created in my life situation.

To believe that age is just a number is a denial of my life path and what that life has brought me. Within my own mind, I feel like I hit a certain age and stopped aging, but I continue to grow. I have made whatever changes needed to be made to maintain my independence. Those changes were mostly scaling back to prevent injury. But that in itself is a nod to the reality of growing older.

I am proud to be the person I am at the age I am. I am active and continue to work without modification at a physical job. I have learned tolerance that only came with my longevity. I would never willfully go back and relive another point in my life. Living is a continuum, life is not. I am a 64 year old living through all the lessons of those 64 years. My life span does not define me. But it is a marker of what matters.