My body still moves, but at a lot slower speed and not nearly with the ability it did forty or fifty years ago. Anyone who says they can do something as well at 50 as they could at 25 was sure lousy at 25. As a friend of mine who died at the age of 103 had a great perspective: “The more birthdays you have, the longer you live.”

Midlife Crisis
I have managed to ski a lot of days in my life with people half my age and maybe that’s why I have decided to write a book about aging. The midlife crisis seems to be some sort of a milestone for a lot of people. Midlife crises are supposed to happen during your 39th year these days because the life expectancy in America today is 78. A hundred years ago the expectancy was only 38.

There are scientists who claim there is no such thing as a midlife crisis. But if there is no such thing, why do so many mid-life people buy a Harley motorcycle, invest in routine cosmetic surgery, or trade in their sixty-year old spouse for a thirty-year old? Must be a crisis of some sort.

Medical Miracles
Ray Kurzweil, one of the world’s leading futurists, believes that with the anti-aging medical research that is going on now, there are people alive today who will live to be at least 150 years old and have a good lifestyle while doing it. Today, you can virtually buy off-the-shelf spare parts for your body, such as knees, hips, hearts, kidneys, livers, and eyes, and someday maybe they will be able to replace brains.

There are already experiments on inserting computer chips in spinal cords to reroute the transmission of nerve signals around an injury. Scientists have developed an artificial red and white blood cell that they can inject with your DNA and then inject the cell into your body where it goes immediately to the problem and cures it. It is reported to be 10,000 times as efficient as a red or white cell that you can create yourself.

Odd Times
It seems to me that today we spend the first third of our lives wanting to grow up and the last two thirds wanting to be children. Why is that? Where else but on a ski hill can you see the chairman of the board of a Fortune 500 company dressed up like a clown in matching lavender and pale-green parka and pants, with powder blue skis and yellow boots? He probably rides up the ski lift sitting next to someone half his age that gets to ski 120 days a year. But the chairman has to work hard to find at least ten days each winter to use his four-million-dollar home right next to the ski lift.

Attitude
The key ingredient I discovered while writing the book about aging is that the best way to enjoy it is to adjust your attitude as you get older.

Instinctively men are hunter-gatherers and women are nesters, and when humankind was evolving, score was kept by how many saber tooth tigers men brought home from the hunt. Today, score is often kept by the number of adult toys one owns. But the person who dies with the most toys is not necessarily the person who had the most fun, as some people seem to think.

When I was a little kid living in a five dollar a month shack in Topanga Canyon during the bottom of the depression, I didn’t know I was hungry and unhappy. The Santa Monica Mountains were out the back door and across the creek and the ocean was just a short walk down a dirt street. The ocean and mountains gave me my freedom and my love for them, and it has stayed with me my entire life.

As Jim Mc Conkey, former director of the ski school at Whistler B.C. says: “It is not what you have done, or what you are going to be doing, it is what you are doing right now. Everything you have, including your life, can be taken away from you in an instant. So enjoy this moment because it is the only one you can count on.”

If you didn’t know when you were born, how old would you be?

Editor’s Note: This is one in a Tahoetopia series written by Warren Miller, legendary ski cinematographer. For other columns by Warren, see the Warren's World section of tahoetopia.com.