It was June of last year that I realized I wasn’t the youngest person in the room anymore. It was the early evening hours, about 5 p.m. when I heard something outside my window. It was the sound of kids playing. They had to have been at least 6 or 7. They were playing on the very street that I used to play on with my friends in the neighborhood. They were wild, joyful, and free. It was the sound of play.
It wasn’t the noise that held my attention, it was the realization that I had crossed an invisible line. A line that made me realize that the games being played haven’t changed, I have. I wasn't dangling off a rope swing, playing tag, or playing pretend. I wasn’t the kid outside anymore. I was getting older.
There is a moment that happens when you cross an invisible line in life. It isn’t dramatic, and it holds no announcement. It’s a moment when you realize that you’re no longer in a place where you used to be. One day you’re living life, and the next, you’re looking back at it.
After this realization, we start to keep score. It’s never out loud, it's internal. Sociologist Bernice Neugarten calls it the “social clock,” which is an unspoken timeline for when things happen in one’s life. Think of events like graduation, getting a job, marriage, etc. No one will ever hand you this schedule, you simply stumble upon it; and the older we get, the louder it seems to be.
The effects of the social clock are subtle at first. A passing comment, a comparison you didn’t mean to make, or someone moving forward in a way that makes you pause for a moment. Suddenly, you realize that time doesn’t feel open-ended anymore. It feels directional. It feels finite. It’s almost as though you’re supposed to be going somewhere specific, even if no one can explain where that place is.
With these ideas in mind, growing older doesn’t make us aware of time, it makes us aware of ourselves in it. And that is when anxiety starts to rear its ugly head.
Because of this anxiety, once you start to pay attention to your age, you realize it’s hard to stop. Every year and every event starts to feel like a quiet evaluation of everything you’ve done up to that point. Every milestone (or lack of one) feels like something worth noticing; and with this, the thought of "I have time" turns into "Do I have enough time?"
This leads into the fear of falling behind.
But what if growing older isn’t about falling behind? What if it just feels that way because we are never meant to move at the same pace?
The timelines we measure ourselves with aren’t universal, they are socially constructed. We all have different paths, different circumstances, and different starting points. What looks like progress rarely tells the whole story, and what feels like stagnation often isn’t.
What if growing older doesn’t look like movement at all? What if it looks like stability? What if it looks like staying? Maybe it all looks like learning how to carry the things that used to stop you entirely. Maybe growing older isn’t about arriving somewhere on time. Maybe it’s about staying in motion, even if that motion feels slow, uneven, or not even there.
The kids outside my window will grow up one day without realizing it. They will cross the invisible line. They’ll look up and notice that they’re no longer the youngest in the room.
Maybe that’s the point.
Are there things keeping you up at night? Do you have any thoughts on what you’ve just read? Contact me at: rodrigueza842@wittenberg.edu. It’s late. I should probably go to sleep.
