It all started with a friendly gesture, an eye smile, and then a conversation. One thing led to another as I talked with the grownups at the camping trip I have gone to this past week. Unlike taking steps into the cold water wetting one's toes at the beach, I drove headfirst into the group of parents/adults and paved the waves to talking about one topic after another. I think this is where I began to realize that age is just merely a number.

I went on a camping trip to Cape May this past week and I can't help but be amazed by how much I have learned and grown the past four days while on the trip. Trying to blend in with the adults opened me up to a whole new world, I thought I would never imagine myself in. It almost felt as if I had stumbled upon a time capsule and turned it on, blasting me to an age at least a decade older than mine. As someone who always had a fear of being vulnerable and afraid of being judged by the microscopic eyes of others, I worried that I would be put under another petri dish for examination the days leading up to the trip. Being raw and vulnerable is something I used to be so good at, but now I am so bad at. It feels like the times have already changed, amidst the pandemic. The masks I wear before I leave my home, become the "masks" I wear when I see other people and new faces. The COVID-19 pandemic introduced us to a scary, outside world and sometimes we just want to stay guarded. There are times now when we feel as if we fear other humans as much as we fear the virus itself. So this has me thinking if people were more raw and vulnerable, before this whole thing happened?

The atmosphere and the vibes at the cabins in the forests were completely different from home. Having grown up in a town near the metropolitan area, I rarely came in contact with a lot of nature. It turns out many of the grownups at the trip were on the same boat as me too. This got me wondering if maybe being excluded from outside distractions such as different types of technology may have caused us to want to get together in small groups and just talk...

about life. So, I took a chance and forgot about the superficial details such as age and whatnot. I realized that this type of human interaction, one that is away from the very shallow aspects of the generation's society is what I was keenly looking for. Age has got nothing on us, as we talked about different things that surfaced our lives. Being able to vibe with other people who are not one's age seemed a lot easier than what people have told me in the past. I have always gotten used to hearing my friends tell me that grownups will never understand us or know how to keep a conversation with us. But that seemed to all have been proven false when I took a seat on the picnic benches and they asked me a question, which led to one thing, then another, and then voila, a conversation.