The shoes you wear when you are 24

Last April I turned 24.24 seemed exciting to me since as a number it has a lot of good properties e.g. it can be factored as 1x2x3x4 (4!) It is the largest integer that is evenly divisible by all natural numbers no larger than it is square root.24 is the sum of the prime twins 11 and 13.It is the kissing number in 4-dimensional space: the maximum number of unit spheres without overlapping. Let me stop pointing out what is good about it. It is getting too intimate. Even though 24 is an even number it is a little odd to me.

24 is the age before hitting 25. It feels like you have to accomplish so many things before that day comes when you are “quarter of a century old”. So you go to the store and you buy running shoes. You start wearing them everywhere: in the kitchen, in the living room, at work, on a date, while reading, while sleeping. Sometimes you forget to tie them well and you fall. Sometimes you run so fast that you become a dot in a horizon: nobody can catch you. Sometimes you want to take them off to rest a little bit but it seems like you promised them to be inseparable. So time goes by and you are running. You are running to hit 25 first. Wait but there is nobody else in this marathon. So you want it or not you are both the first and the last. Then you slow down, you take “the shoes you wear at 24” off and you walk with no shoes .

Does it really matter 24 ,25 or 40,45 ?I think what matters is what shoes we choose to wear.Where are those shoes taking us ? Hopefully they are not taking us to any numbers but to a place where we truly want to be.