Numbers

Life by the numbers? I just had a birthday - decided that at my "age" they do not count anymore unless they end with a 5 or a 0 : ). With each year that I have surpassed the age at which my father died, I do think more about lifespans. My father died at 56; my mother at 95.

My mother and father both lived through the influenza epidemic of 1918 - 1919, the one that killed 675,000 Americans. How quickly we forget that what we now call "the flu" was a leading cause of death. Back in 1906 - 1907, when my parents were born, the life expectancy of a child born then was about 48 years. By the time I was born life expectancy was about 65 and for children born in 2001 [ the most recent government stats] it is about 77.

As our life expectancy increases, what we can do with and in our lives expands. Back when people such as Alexander the Great were around, life expectancy was about 35 and so you got into your life's work very early - in what we now call childhood - and did your "thing" in your late teens and 20's. Alexander became king at 20 on the death of his father and died when he was 32! So he had 12 years of doing his grownup "job." Of course he had been in training since he was a child and ruled in his father's absence but the major war campaigns were in his 20's.

There was no period of finding oneself - there wasn't any time. Adolescence is a "stage" that came about as our lifespan grew. Now we can spend time in school figuring out what we want to do when we grow up - and some, and I do include myself, are still figuring out what we will do when we grow up.

With our growing spans of life - we can keep learning and changing. Or we can stagnate - the choices are ours.