It started as what I thought would be a perfectly ordinary morning commute to work. As usual, I seemed to be hitting every red light and finding every bad driver along the way. I was thinking about the day ahead and absentmindedly chewing a piece of gum when I suddenly felt something hard and crunchy in my mouth. At first, I assumed a filling had come loose. That had happened before. But when I ran my tongue over the area, all I could feel was a tiny nub where a tooth was supposed to be. I pulled the gum out of my mouth and stared at what appeared to be an entire tooth embedded in it.

Fortunately, it wasn’t actually my tooth. Unfortunately, it was the crown that had been attached to it for nearly twenty years.

That one small event led to multiple trips to the dentist, a referral to an endodontist, a root canal, a new crown, and the discovery of a few other dental issues that also needed attention. Before long, I found myself becoming a regular at offices I had spent years trying to avoid.

After the drilling, the Novocain, the root canal, and the new crown were behind me, the whole experience made me laugh a little. It also made me realize how much my relationship with healthcare and aging had changed over the past several years.

I remember wondering years ago why my parents always seemed to have so many doctor’s appointments. It felt like every week they were headed to their primary care physician, the cardiologist, the ophthalmologist, the dermatologist, or the dentist. At the time, I couldn’t imagine living that way.

Apparently, the Progressive commercials were right. Somewhere along the way, I had become my parents. I now have my own primary care physician, a dermatologist, a gastroenterologist, a urologist, a dentist, and now an endodontist. I have regularly scheduled appointments with these providers.

Ironically, I no longer dread those appointments the way I once did. I have come to appreciate them. They help keep me healthy, catch problems early, and allow me to continue doing the things I enjoy.

The harder adjustment has been something else entirely. It has been letting go of the person I used to think I was.

For most of my life, I have thought of myself as young and healthy. As long as I could swim fifty yards of butterfly, walk on my hands, do fifty push-ups, and spend long days kayaking or hiking, that identity felt completely natural. I didn’t think about getting older because there was little reason to.

Then life began offering gentle reminders that youth doesn’t last forever. None of those reminders came all at once. There was the torn rotator cuff, the gallbladder that needed to be removed, and the crown that fell off. Then there were all the AARP mailings that started showing up with disturbing frequency. Individually, none of those events seemed particularly significant. Collectively, they challenged a story I had been telling myself for decades.

The story wasn’t, “I’m healthy.”

The story was, “I’m young.”

Those are not the same thing.

Like everyone else, I eventually had to acknowledge that while I may still be generally healthy, I certainly wasn’t getting any younger.

I suspect many lawyers experience something similar. We spend decades developing our careers, raising families, paying mortgages, and solving problems for everyone around us. In many ways, we continue to think of ourselves as the same people we were twenty or thirty years ago. Then one day we realize we know far more than we ever wanted to know about cholesterol and PSA levels, blood glucose, and triglycerides. And somehow, conversations about colonoscopy prep have become perfectly normal.

Growing older has a way of sneaking up on us. Psychologists have observed that our mental image of ourselves often lags behind reality. We continue to think of ourselves as younger than we are because our identity changes more slowly than the calendar. When life presents evidence that no longer fits that image, it can feel surprisingly unsettling.

Perhaps we postpone confronting the reality of aging because, in some ways, it protects us. As long as we continue thinking of ourselves as young, we don’t have to wrestle with what growing older means.

Psychologists have observed that we often protect ourselves from emotionally uncomfortable realities by avoiding them, minimizing them, or postponing our confrontation with them. In that sense, a delayed doctor’s appointment or trip to the dentist isn’t always just about inconvenience. Sometimes it is about postponing what those appointments may require us to acknowledge. They remind us that our bodies, like everything else in nature, require maintenance and are not immune to the effects of time. They also invite us to reconsider the story we have been telling ourselves about who we are.

The challenge, then, is learning to update the story we tell ourselves without giving up on the future. How do we acknowledge that we may no longer be able to do everything we did as teenagers while still pushing ourselves to discover what we’re capable of today? I may have lost some flexibility, agility, and strength over the years, but I can still challenge my current limits in much the same way I did when I was younger. The difference is that today’s limits are not the same as they were forty years ago.

Growing older doesn’t require us to stop challenging ourselves. It simply requires us to challenge the person we are today instead of the person we used to be. Perhaps that’s why the story we tell ourselves matters so much. It doesn’t simply describe who we are. It influences what we believe we are still capable of becoming. The story we tell ourselves becomes our mindset. It shapes not only how we see ourselves but also what we believe is still possible.

I have long believed that the stories we tell ourselves have the power to shape both our mental and physical health. That belief is supported by a growing body of research. Yale researcher Becca Levy has spent decades studying how our beliefs about aging influence health. Her research suggests that people who hold more positive views about aging tend to enjoy better health outcomes, recover more effectively from setbacks, and even live longer than those who view aging primarily as a period of inevitable decline.

Research suggests that people who believe they can remain active are more likely to remain active. People who expect to continue learning often keep learning. People who see exercise as worthwhile are more likely to keep exercising. Our expectations shape our behaviors, and our behaviors influence our health.

That is why I have no interest in pretending that I am still thirty years old. Neither do I have any interest in acting as though life is all downhill from here. There is a middle path. It begins by honestly acknowledging who I am today while refusing to give up on who I can still become.

The older I get, the more I appreciate the wisdom of Max Ehrmann’s Desiderata, where he wrote: “Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth.”

For many years, I interpreted those words as an invitation to lower my expectations. I don’t read them that way anymore. To me, “gracefully surrendering the things of youth” does not mean surrendering curiosity, strength, determination, adventure, purpose, or joy. It simply means recognizing that every season of life asks something different of us.

When we are young, our bodies often take care of themselves. As we grow older, stewardship replaces assumption. Maintenance replaces neglect. Wisdom replaces invincibility.

Perhaps the challenge is not learning how to grow old. Perhaps the challenge is learning to re-engage with the person we are today instead of clinging to the person we used to be.

I may never again think of myself as a young man. But I still hope to think of myself as an active one. I still want to hike difficult trails, spend long days on the water, exercise vigorously, learn new skills, travel to new places, and remain curious about the world around me. I still want to do physically challenging things for as long as my body allows. The difference is that I now recognize those goals require a little more intentional care than they once did.

That means keeping the appointments and having the screenings. It means listening when my body tells me something needs attention. This is not weakness or surrender but is an investment in the years ahead.

Looking back, I realize that losing a crown was never really about dentistry. It was an invitation to re-engage with the person I am today instead of clinging to the person I used to be. That doesn’t mean giving in to aging. It means aging with intention.

And if I can accept today’s reality while continuing to pursue tomorrow’s possibilities, I think I’ll have taken kindly the counsel of the years after all.