We Are All the Same Age & 10 of Pentacles
Being 47
Earlier this week, I planned to go to a networking event called “collage + connect.” When I first read about it, this event drew me like a magnet. I love collage, and I love to connect!
Once upon a time, I also loved networking, but then the pandemic happened and now that feels like a distant memory.
I have become a bit socially anxious. In recent years, the fear of being the oldest one in the room has kept me from attending things sometimes.
So when, upon a closer look at the “collage + connect” description I saw that it was for “young and emerging professionals,” I deflated. I decided not to go.
I understand that age is a privilege not everyone gets. I know that I live in a culture with very negative attitudes about aging and women aging in particular.
In my 20s and 30s, when I witnessed older women stressing about aging, I promised myself I wouldn’t do that. I would age gracefully, embrace the crone archetype, and let wisdom be power.
I am trying to do that. And yet—marching through my 40s, enduring the ceaseless pains and humiliations of perimenopause, noticing women my age disappearing from leadership and movie roles—it catches me.
Now I complain about my face and body. I don’t know who the new celebrities are. I frequently work with gen Z colleagues who could literally be my offspring. It’s all a little unnerving.
Overwhelmed, I have a word with myself.
I tell myself the same thing I have told women friends who have experienced these meltdowns before me. It’s a core mantra that can restore my perspective and pull me out of the despair spiral.
We’re all the same age.
This concept was born from the idea of the bronze age or the ice age—the idea that a swath of history encompasses many years. Sometimes hundreds of years.
It also is related to the idea, in high school, you have a class—everyone in my graduating year is the class of 1995.
You’d never say someone in your class was older or younger than you even though everyone was born at a different time.
Stick with me.
So I can see it this way: Here on earth, every single person who was alive at any time from the moment of my birth to my death is in my same class here at earth school as me.
We are all, all of us alive right now, the same age! In the grand scope of every human who has ever lived, we are all conscious during this same fleeting blink. All. The. Same. Age. Whatever this age is.
Deep breath in, deep breath out. We’re all the same age.
This is a point of view that puts me at ease in social situations. It prevents having a boss 15 years my junior from making me lose my mind, and actually helps me learn from her.
It forbids me from dismissing the formidable wisdom and insights of “younger” people because I can zoom out and see that we are all the same age. I do not know better.
There’s a tarot card that carries this message for me: The 10 of Pentacles.
It shows multiple generations in the same place having different experiences in a single present. There’s a different magic in being an elder compared to the magic of being a kid, but everyone is equal.
In tarot there is no time, so there is no age.
It’s another truth revealed by the deck: We are all the same age.