Golden Years

We blog for a million different reasons, but in the end we’re all storytellers. Writing Challenges help you push your…

By Erica V.

We blog for a million different reasons, but in the end we’re all storytellers. Writing Challenges help you push your writing boundaries and explore new ideas, subjects, and styles.

To participate, read the challenge instructions and write at least one post in response. Tag your post with DPchallenge and include a link to this post to generate a pingback. Make sure your post has been specifically published in response to this challenge. We might just highlight some of our favorites on Freshly Pressed on Fridays, or in our quarterly newsletter.

No matter how you shake it, it happens to all of us: we grow older. As our age changes, so does our perspective. This week, we’re asking you to take a look at those little numbers that often mean so much.

Everything Changes

A professor of mine once told me that each time he read Marcel Proust‘s In Search of Lost Time, it took on a different meaning. The way the book delves into memory and the passing of time, he explained, resonated differently depending on what experiences you yourself had been through over the years. While I could never reproduce his unique zeal for the father of the modern novel, I admired the sentiment.

For the longest time, well after I’d moved beyond my teenage years, I still automatically told people I was sixteen when they asked my age. Clearly, I was still young enough that asking my age wasn’t a rude question, but I was by no means in my mid-teens. Mentally, however, I hadn’t caught up with just how old I actually was.

Then something shifted. We often emphasize age as a number, a calculation of the days, months, and years we’ve been awake and living. Yet, as the saying goes, our age is also a mental state, a series of milestones that remind us of where we’ve been, and where we’re going.

Just A Number

For this week’s writing challenge, we’re asking you to explore what age means to you. Is the the loss of youth, or the cultivation of wisdom? Do things get better as you grow older, or worse? There are many ways to interpret age, often depending on your relationship with the passing of time.

Need some help getting started? Use the suggestions below as a jumping off point for your own posts on age and aging:

Age feels all the more poignant because, let’s face it, time doesn’t last forever. What if you never aged, or if you were immortal? Would you choose either if you could?
Write us a synopsis of your memoir. What are some significant milestones in your life? Which age was the best, and which was the worst?
Do you think young people face different challenges today? What shifts have you seen in youth culture, from your own experience all the way to your grandchildren’s experience?
For our fiction writers, cultivate a character. Through your imagination, pinpoint a common theme in his or her life, and show us how your character’s perspective changes as he or she grows older.

For the truly adventurous, we challenge you to try hitting two challenges with one stone, er, post. Combine this week’s photo challenge on perspective with your writerly musings on age, youth, and how your perspective changes as you grow older. We’re looking forward to hearing your wizened take on this week’s theme!