Do I Feel 68?

At 68, life feels both long and fleeting. A reflection on memory, time, age, and the mystery of what growing older means.

The numbers that mark our passage through life are precise on paper, yet inwardly they seldom settle into anything exact.

Arun Kumar

A couple of weeks ago, I turned 68. Sometime during that day, J. asked, “Do I feel 68?”

Perhaps what J. meant was not whether I felt 68 in any literal sense. The numbers that mark our passage through life are precise on paper, yet inwardly they seldom settle into anything exact. They accumulate quietly, like rings in a tree, recording time without telling us what it should feel like to stand within it. Or perhaps it was only a rhetorical question, one of those small remarks that drift into the day and leave behind an unexpectedly large echo.

The question made me look back over the 68-year arc of my life — where it began, and where it has brought me now. In one sense, it feels like a very long journey, stretching from my boyhood, through my years at Indian Institute of Technology, then onward to America and all that followed after. In another sense, it feels as though the days, months, and years have slipped past with astonishing haste, as if time, after lingering in childhood, eventually learned how to run.

Living through time can feel like walking through a hall of mirrors. Events recede, enlarge, bend out of proportion, or return unexpectedly from strange angles. What once seemed immense may now appear small and insignificant; what felt ordinary at the time may glow in memory with a significance it never announced when it first occurred. The relationship between memory and time is rarely faithful. It is impressionistic, almost dreamlike, preserving sentiment more readily than sequence.

There is still a remembrance of moving through that timeline, but the specifics have faded. The individual days of my thirteenth year on earth, no longer possess enough sharpness to be distinguished from one another. They survive not as dates, but blurred visions.

With time, memory itself becomes a blurred spectrum. What remains are recollections without timestamps: the school I attended, the evenings spent playing in the park across from our house where children my age gathered, the shy ache of a crush on someone I never quite found the courage to speak to, the bicycle rides to the vegetable market. If I reach inward, I can still draw these scenes from their slumber, though they guard their secret well and refuse to tell me the exact year or day to which they belonged.

My mind still carries these small fragments without attaching them to any particular moment in time. Perhaps that is because they were woven into the ordinary fabric of life, part of a rhythm that extended across those years between twelve and seventeen years of age. Routine, while we are living inside it, often feels unremarkable; only later do we understand that it was quietly building the emotional landscape of a life.

And yet there are certain days that remain sharply individualized in memory. September 11 is one of them. I remember the beauty of the day — the clear blue sky, the slight chill in the air hinting that winter was not too far away — the drive back in the green pickup to collect our son from school, and then the hours at home in front of the television, watching the events unfold and trying, like everyone else, to make sense of what could not yet be understood.

In general, though, stretches of time do not possess the same firmness as distances in space. A road can be measured; a year back in the past is not held with the same certainty.

By some strange distortion of time, my earlier life now feels immeasurably distant, as though it belongs not merely to another era, but almost to another self.

So now I am 68. A lifetime has already passed behind me, and I am retired now, living with a clearer awareness of mortality than I once did. At this stage, one no longer takes for granted that time will continue to unfold indefinitely.

In two years, I will be 70, and I am certain someone will ask again, perhaps half in jest and half in wonder, what it feels like to be 70. I am equally certain that I will not have a satisfactory answer then either.

And if, in the community clubhouse, I were to meet someone older than myself, I might ask in return, “Do you feel 90 now?” I would not expect an answer. There is no handbook that tells us what one is supposed to feel at 90, or 70, or 68. The question is less about information. We ask it because age is visible from the outside, but never fully knowable from within.

Answer or no answer, I am glad to be here. I am glad to be 68. I look forward to the pleasures that remain — playing pickleball, and now and then finding myself on a river cruise, watching towns drift past as time continues its patient onward march, carrying me toward 70. For now, that is enough. All I can hope is that I will still be here to hear the question--Do you feel 70?

Ciao, and thanks for reading.