I’m sure you’ve had the same kind of experience I’ve had—the experience of bumping into someone you haven’t seen for many years. Maybe it is at a conference, maybe at a wedding, or maybe through pure serendipity. Yet now you’re face to face and you realize that even while you’re enjoying a conversation with that other person you’re also having a separate conversation within yourself.

In the first conversation, you’re recounting what has happened in the intervening years, telling of trials and triumphs and everything in between. Meanwhile, in the second and silent conversation you’re thinking to yourself, “Wow, he looks old! He has a lot less hair than I remember and a lot more of it is gray.” And it isn’t long before you find yourself wondering, “Wait, is he thinking the same about me? Do I look as old as he does?” And frankly, he probably is and you probably do.

When we part ways with friends and then encounter them again ten or twelve years on, we can’t help but think how different they look. And almost invariably the years and decades have not been particularly kind. Time changes our


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