This mind game will help you feel more optimistic about your age

When I was younger I used to play a mind game with myself. I think I was 17 when I first tried it. I was laying in bed, I could hear my parents having some banal conversation downstairs and my dog had just absentmindedly passed through my room for a sniff before plodding downstairs. And it hit me that this would all fade. The thought hit me at the same time as tears suddenly stung my eyes. Everyone would die (myself included, obviously) and everything I knew would one day be a memory.

I think I was in that headspace because my grandma had pretty advanced dementia and had been living with us for five years in what used to be my dad’s office. I had witnessed her wilt from somebody I knew to a confused shell of a person, lovely but vacant. We had a sunken living room whose one step was lined with a barricade of suitcases to deter her from trying to ascend or descend on her own. Whenever she tried she would get stuck on the 10-inch platform, as though trapped on the ledge of some great mountain.

So I just laid there for a few minutes and thought, what if I had gone to bed an 80 year old with the bulk of my life in the rearview? And what if I woke up now, in this body, in the house I grew up in, with all the people I loved still alive and well? I treated the scenario like I was an actor in a movie and someone had just called action.

I lifted my hands out from under the covers and stared at them in awe. They were young hands, unlined, the veins non-protruding. I looked around my room, all five walls painted different neon colors from when I was an elementary school Lizzie McGuire fan. I went to the bathroom and stared in the mirror, feigning disbelief. Yesterday I was old and now I’m seventeen again, wow.

As I walked downstairs I let my hands rest on the banister as if I was feeling it for the first time. I almost got distracted from the experiment when I saw my dog again. Yesterday you were dead, I thought. It made me sad. And then I saw my parents, young and healthy. Look at this life, I thought, before any bad really hits. Before you know what happens next.

I couldn’t say how long I kept up the Nicholas Cage game (I’m not quite sure why I call it that, I think it’s from that movie The Family Man, where he wakes up one day to a totally different version of a life that could have been) but I’ve done it now and again since that day.

Of course, the bar keeps shifting. I was 17 then, now 13 years have passed. I’m 30 and I have to remind myself that who I am today is covetable to an 80 or even a 35 year old me. Not only because youth is overly fetishized, but because time can seem so much more ample in hindsight than when looking ahead. Sure, looking back time seems to have passed in the blink of an eye but all too often I wind up kicking myself thinking about how much could have been accomplished (professional, personal or otherwise) in the year, the month, or even the day in consideration.

When I choose to play this mind game I feel a new, optimistic energy. I check in with myself, archive the moment I’m living and give way to all those small sadnesses about who and what I might lose in the years to come. But it’s precisely these feelings that can remind you how grateful you are for all that you have and all that you can do now.