"One wants to live without aging, and in reality, one aging without living."
(Alexander Mitscherlich, psychoanalyst)
When I ask someone about his age, I always get a number in response. But how does he know what age I meant? Or does everyone assume we only have one age? I suppose so. But, we have more than one age. We have three ages.
The first is the chronological age. It describes the section of time we have already spent on time. It is the common temporal age, which is calculated according to the date of birth. We celebrate our birthdays and when we are young, we wish their number to be larger (finally grown-up) and when it is large, we wish it to be smaller again (to be young again). It is always past, is fixed and cannot be changed. Although completely meaningless, it is the age to which we pay the most attention. But no matter how hard we try, we cannot influence it, we cannot change it.
The second age is the biological age. It corresponds to the present and describes the state of the body. It influences and limits our life span. It can be measured and often there are significant deviations from chronological age. One possible method of measurement is to determine the length of the telomeres. Telomeres are the ends of our genetic threads, the chromosomes. The telomeres are structural elements of the DNA, which are responsible for its stability. With each cell division, they shorten until they fall below a critical length and the cell stops further cell division or triggers active cell death. In contrast to chronological age, biological age can certainly be influenced, i.e. it can be slowed down, in some cases even turned back slightly. The methods used to do this are often found under the term anti-aging. Of course, we can also accelerate it. In fact, this is what we do best. Decisive for our biological age is our lifestyle, especially nutrition, exercise and relaxation. Our modern lifestyle with fast food, predominantly sedentary work and constant stress accelerates the biological age enormously. Medical advances can extend chronological age, but not a healthy, full life.
The third age is the spiritual age. It corresponds to the future. It is the age of wisdom and knowledge. Here most people achieve what they want for their chronological age. They stay young and hardly age at all. In contrast to chronological or biological age, a high age is desirable here. For here a high age does not mean decline and death, but development, experience, and knowledge. Just like biological age, we can also influence our spiritual age through our lifestyle. Decisive for this are our thinking, compassion, mindfulness, heartfulness or meditation.
The chronological age is simply the passage of time. The biological age is our physical/material development and the spiritual age is our mental/spiritual development.
Although usually negative, aging is always positive. If we did not age, we would not develop, and we would not progress. Many don't want to age, but they also don't want to spend their whole life as a newborn baby.
Strangely, we pay the most attention to the age we have no influence whatsoever, namely the chronological age. As you get older, you discover your biological age and start to care more about your body. But we hardly care about our spiritual age. That is a pity. At best we can slow down our physical decay, but we cannot stop it. Instead, we should rather worry about our imperishable part and prevent our soul from atrophying as well. To do this, we must age spiritually. Spiritual aging is beyond all time.
It is not so important how old you get, it is much more important how you get old.
