Age is just a number.

A cliché phrase, right? But honestly it is true.

As part of my university degree, I have had the opportunity to meet an exchange student from South Korea and tutor her in English. I asked her to write me a short piece of writing on South Korea, and one of the many facts she included was this:

In Korea, we count a child right after he or she is born as a one-year-old child. So, the way we count our age will be slightly different. Though I am 20 years old here, I am 22 back in my country.

Surely this goes to show that you cannot truly judge someone based on their age? My student is 22 and I am 20, but we were both born in 1994.

She also made an interesting statement to me when talking about the education system:

Just because you’re 16 years old, it doesn’t mean that you’ve lived 16 years of your life. Age is just a number.

Now although I don’t believe she meant anything deep by that, I think that she is totally right.

It’s the same with time and dates. Time doesn’t really mean anything. We’ve just created it to add structure to our lives. The Chinese have a different calender to me, which goes to show that time is created by us. People place too much importance on dates, times and age. Yes, they are brilliant for creating order, and are definitely needed in life, but people have taken what was a good idea and have let it restrict them in so many ways. They’re almost trapped by it. 

A person I have had the privilege of getting to really know in my life has always joked that he was born 22. He’s only 19 now. But this person has a greater understanding on the world than a lot of adults. A lot of people die without making the realisations that he made at a young age. I don’t know for definite, and I’m not sure he truly knows it himself, but there’s definitely a reason why he says he was born 22.

I don’t know what happens when our physical beings die, I’m not sure about whether I believe that our spirit existed before our physical beings were born. But if they did, then you can’t judge someone based on for how long their physical being has existed.

I don’t really know where I’m going with this post, I currently can’t collect my thoughts in a way that can be expressed through writing, so I’ll just leave it here for now.

“What does not existing mean?”

Not existing is the unmanifested and existing is the manifested. You can’t exist without having not existed first.

Technically, it is impossible to “not exist” once something has existed. Because if something doesn’t exist, it means it must have existed at some point for people to know it “doesn’t exist” anymore. For example, people say that dinosaurs no longer exist, but for people to be able to say that, they must exist in some way. Their physical form isn’t around anymore, but they still exist through knowledge, fossils, their cells have disintegrated and are part of the planet in some way.

Okay so dinosaurs may be a bit of a crappy example. But let’s take humans. Once they exist, even when they die, they still exist in some way or another. To not exist means to exist (Usually in a different form to what one is used to). You can’t have one without the other.

You could say to not exist means the disappearance of any physical being. But once something is conscious and has being, it can’t be taken away. It’s non-existence has been created by it’s existence, so technically it’ll always exist.

Sugar dissolves in tea but it doesn’t mean it no longer exists anymore just because you can’t see it. You can still taste its presence. It’s the same with everything on this planet. It may not exist in the form that we know, but it will always be present in some way or another.