Sunday morning in Whitby, Ontario may mean many things to my fellow suburban citizens. Frantic scrambling to get to the youth hockey arena, religious worship, or pure sloth, deserved or not, are common. When our underachieving girls’ basketball team is not at some athletic outpost for a weekend tournament, my early Sunday begins with the hefting of the incomparable Sunday edition of the New York Times into our kitchen for a quiet, almost reverential read.

The Sunday Times is over two pounds of opinion, insight and advertising in equal measures. Why the massive Sunday edition – no doubt delivered by strong backed men to my door 700 miles from New York – contains flyer after flyer from stores in which I will never shop, I am not certain. I feel very cosmopolitan just the same.

It was the New York Times that told me last month, emphatically, that 45 was the new 30. I had not known this, and I read on with interest. While I meet the biological criteria to be a baby boomer, I have never felt any kinship with the progression of boomer culture that I have witnesses in my lifetime. The boomer generation is a demographic choked with neuroses and self doubt. Its cultural highlights are abominations such as disco, Thigh Master machines and the Macarena. I have become used to the boomers and their attitudes towards their bodies, fad upon fad. They have passed from aerobics to Zen yoga, and every point in between, clutching at their presumed (and poorly remembered) vibrant youth through Botox and implants of every kind. I have laughed at the boomers whenever I could, as I trudged in my training along the roads, or played basketball, successfully avoiding the trends that boomerdom has visited upon our world.

45 is the new 30… the article was beautifully written. The author spoke elegantly of the power of early middle age with a tone that recalled those horrible “Sex in the City” people, all self absorbed in their speech and a sense of entitlement dripping from every pore. We, as the author said, were the exquisite combination of experience and physical vitality. We deserved to avoid the subversive creep of aging. We should not be held captive by a society that does not understand the power of age 45, so we henceforth shall call it age 30.

After I had finished laughing at this brilliant, unintended parody of serious social commentary, I pondered the whole thing. I laughed again, recognizing with mock horror that I had now regressed to age 32. I waited for my then mullet hair style to spring from my bald skull – nothing happened. I remembered an observation of Oscar Wilde’s, “Thirty five is a very attractive age. London society is full of women who have remained 35 for years.”

The suggestion that 45 is the new 30 is the ultimate avoidance of reality – a silicone implant for the soul. I thought of a dozen different pithy letters to send to my poor misdirected boomer sister, but I decided not to try. I didn’t think that she would appreciate my point. Age is important only to the bean counters of this earth – those soulless, desperate people who think that when they reach 45 (or some other supposed number of significance), all that remains is an ever faster and more treacherous slope in a life that will vanish before they have truly lived.

Age is one of the great irrelevancies of this earth. Once a person achieves the legal ability to act independently, is it not a distillation of talent, attitude, desire, luck, and faith that defines us and our worth on this earth? When the boomer reaches a biological 60 years of age, I assume that they will claim the prerogative of being 45. I see a baby boomer in a hospital room, a wizened old man yelling at his family as he nears death, “I can’t die yet, I’m only 65!”

Old age, what ever that may be, is always going to be 20 years older than I am.

I am 47 years old (or 32, by another reckoning). Some mornings, when a long forgotten injury reminds me that life’s progressions are not always positive, I feel every day of it. Life is a great, sublime compendium of experience, attitudes, and emotions, where a person’s stated age is like the cover of a book – unless its opened, read, and contemplated, you learn very little. In our work, in our private lives, in sport, we value people by what they can do – age is for birth certificates.

I am glad that I am 47 years old. I will likely be even happier when I am 48, 58, or 80. Old age, what ever that may be, is always going to be 20 years older than I am.