A few weeks ago, my son asked me if I knew the differences between being a child, teenager, adult and elderly.
Before I could reply, my son – eager to impress with his newfound knowledge – answered his own question.
“Well, you see it’s like this Mummy,” he began, palms up as he paused dramatically before continuing.
“I am a child but in a few years time, I will turn into a teenager. That’s when I hit 13.
“As for you, now you are an adult but very soon you are going to turn into an el-der-ly because your birthday is coming soon.
“Geddit?” he asked.
“Yes I got it,” I said trying to wrap my mind around being called an elderly by my son.
Today, I am 46 years old. In my son’s book, that translates as elderly.
While I am not one of those people who don’t like revealing their age, I would be lying if I said turning a year older doesn’t affect me a little. But what to do? It’s my age. Hiding it is not going to change that. Therefore, I may as well embrace it.
After all, as the saying goes, age is just a number.
But if age is indeed just a number, where do we draw the line between an adult (middle aged apparently) and being an elderly?
According to Wikipedia, young adulthood is considered to be the developmental stage of those who are between 20 years old and 40 years.
Middle age has been defined as the time between ages 45 and 65 years old. That’s where I belong it seems.
An elderly would be in the 65 and above age group.
Personally, I think that in this day and age, being placed in these different age groups no longer applies. Heard the saying 50 is the new 30 or 80 is the new 60?
While some people feel that the term elderly is used to describe people who are feeble and unable to care for themselves, I know plenty of 65-year-olds and above who live active and vibrant lives.
Last night, I stumbled upon a story about an 86-year-old triathlon-running nun called Sister Madonna Buder or famously known as the ‘Iron Nun’. Born Marie Dorothy Buder on July 24, 1930, Buder holds the current world record for the oldest person to ever finish an Ironman Triathlon, which she obtained at age 82 by finishing the Subaru Ironman Canada on Aug 26, 2012.
The race requires participants to swim 2.4 miles (approx. 3.9km), bike 112 miles (180 km) and run 26.2 miles (42km).
I could barely finish a 5km run without wanting to collapse at the end!
According to Buder, she wasn’t introduced to running until age 47 or 48, when a priest suggested it.
Buder said: “There were a lot of times where I had to think about failures and not reaching the goal that I set for myself, Then I realised, the only failure is not to try.”
Buder is right. If you don’t try how would you know that you can or can’t do something.
It reminded me of the tagline of a Northern Territory tourism campaign in Australia in 1993 that said, “you’ll never never know if you never never go.” As cheesy as it sounds, that tagline stuck with me all these years and will pop up in my mind especially when my son tells me that he cannot do something.
So as I embrace my new age, I want to look back at what I consider my personal achievements in the past several years.
Firstly, my greatest accomplishment is my son. We waited 12 long years for him and God gave us a wonderful child in 2011. Anybody who has struggled to have a child will understand when I say that, to us, our boy is our miracle child. A gift from God.
Secondly, I have climbed two mountains. I can’t run or swim long distance but I seem to have the stamina to climb mountains.
The first mountain I climbed is the 810-metre Mount Santubong. Some people would scoff and say, “That’s not a mountain, that’s a hill.” But hey, you try it and tell me that that is not a mountain.
It was my first time ever attempting to go up a mountain, which I did with the team from Outlook, the former features section of the old Sarawak Tribune.
Six of us started the climb but only 3 of us made it to the top. I was one of the three. As a first timer, it was a tough climb. I don’t know what the trail is like now but back then it was tough with many challenging vertical sections along the way.
While climbing Santubong was quite a feat – it took us an entire day to go up and come down – I would say that my second biggest triumph was climbing Mount Sinai in Egypt.
My husband and I were living in the resort city of Sharm-el-Sheikh at the time and we couldn’t let the chance to climb the mountain pass us by.
So on my 35th birthday in 2006, we ascended the 2,285-metre (7,497 feet) mountain – the peak where it’s believed that Moses received the Ten Commandments.
Mount Sinai is located near the city of Saint Catherine in the Sinai region. It is surrounded on all sides by higher peaks of the mountain range. At the foot of the mountain is Saint Catherine’s Monastery, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and is called the oldest working Christian monastery in the world. The monastery is also believed to enshrine the burning bush from which God first revealed himself to Moses.
Strangely, I found the trail up Mount Sinai not as tough as Mount Santubong. But it is possibly because the trail was very obvious.
It was a good walk up (you need to be fit obviously) the sacred mountain despite being chilled to the bone at 2 am, with only our torch lighting our path. But the most amazing sight at that hour was the amazing glittering stars above us that seemed so close that it felt like I could almost touch them.
There are two routes that you can take to go up and down the mountain. We decided to start with the Camel Path, a gentler, winding, wide path that snakes its way up to the summit that can be completed by the average traveller in 2.5 hours.
And yes there are camels along the way that you could hire and ride on but about a kilometre before the summit, you would have to walk the 750 steps up. This is where the challenging part takes place because the steps are uneven rock surfaces all the way to the top.
Going down we took the 3750 Steps of Penitence, the aptly named steep path, which has been quite literally carved out of the rock by monks. This was a tougher route than the first but to have the opportunity to tread on Holy ground was worth it.
So with that in mind, I think I should begin my 46th year with facing challenges head on and achieving something that I could look back on in a few years and say “I did that.”
After all, “you’ll never never know if you never never go.”
