Age is just a number. Regardless of the lines on your skin, the gray in your hair, or the years you’ve walked on this planet, age is, for the most part, a state of mind.
You can be young in years and already tired of life, set in your routines and unwilling to stray far from what’s familiar. Or you can be older in years and young at heart, full of curiosity and enthusiasm for living a life of discovery while finding joy in the experience of living.
There’s no wrong way to be, as long as you’re genuinely happy living the life you’ve chosen. But for me, zest for life has always been part of a voracious appetite to experience this world as profoundly as possible. It’s a desire to live fully and deeply.
I know thirty-somethings who are perfectly happy with an early bedtime, familiar routines, and have little desire for adventure. I know forty-somethings with the energy, stamina, and enthusiasm of people half their age, yet with the wisdom that comes only from having truly lived.
And I know people in their sixties and eighties who chose to linger around the table a little longer, who are the last to leave the dance floor, who are willing to stay for the after-party, and who might even carry on until the sun comes up.
They seem to have understood something important about living an adventurous, meaningful, and fulfilling life built to last.
I hope I’m always up for dancing the night away, as long as my body allows. And when it can’t, I hope I’ll keep dancing anyway, even if only within my heart and soul.
No one has taught me more about that than my uncle.
He has always been a father figure to me. I lost my own father when I was nine, and although much time has passed, the void he left has never fully closed. Thankfully, my mom had several brothers, two of whom I adored and who loved me back just as fiercely.
My uncle, the last of them still with us, has always loved a good party. He also tells me that death has walked beside him all his life, not as something he fears but as something he respects and accepts.
Last week, having recently turned eighty, he said he knows he’s already lived a long life. “Death has been generous with me,” he said. Whatever time he has left, he said, is time he never expected to get, given everything he’s been fortunate enough to survive.
“Death has been generous with me,” he told me.
He grew up in El Salvador and survived several brushes with death there. Later, in the United States, he survived a quintuple bypass and decades of alcoholism, finding sobriety nearly four years ago.
My uncle is a force to be reckoned with. His story holds everything one life can hold, both tenderness and wreckage, and it has made me admire and love him deeply.
But not everyone is so fortunate.
A few days ago, a cousin of mine passed away. He was only forty-five. He died far too prematurely, and I feel an ache in my heart for his tragic ending and for the loss our family is experiencing.
We understand, intellectually, that death is part of life’s natural circle. But sometimes it arrives without warning, taking someone who might have had another forty-five years.
Grief for my cousin’s life cut short and gratitude for my uncle’s long life lived sit side by side in my heart right now.
I live with profound gratitude for life and mindfulness of my own mortality. Life can end in a split second. That’s exactly why what we do in every moment matters: how we live, how we love, and how we treat the people we care about most.
Death is always somewhere nearby, taking a human life — a stranger’s, an acquaintance’s, or one day our own. I never want to forget that, not because I want to live in fear but because it’s a bracing reminder that life is a precious gift. It’s something we should not only be grateful for but also celebrate every single day by living with grace.
As I mentioned on our most-recent Gastronomad Experience Journal, this has been a year of meaningful milestones for us.
Twenty years as Gastronomads. Ten years of The Gastronomad Experience. These milestones humble me.
They remind me of the fullness and meaning life can bring when we stay open to it, even after the rough seasons and the hard challenges, after loss, even when we know the future is not promised.
What I’m certain of is that I have so much more to learn. I have so much more to live for.
And I have so much more to share.
That age is a state of mind, not a number on a calendar.
That zest for life is an appetite and, like any appetite, must be fed with intention.
That death isn’t something to fear. It’s a reminder that life is for finding joy in it and celebrating it every day.
That extra time is a gift, not a guarantee, and every year beyond what we expected is one worth honoring.
That grief for a life cut short and gratitude for a long life lived can exist in the same space, at the same time, in the same heart.
That growing older isn’t the same as growing old, and keeping alive every version of the person I’ve been isn’t nostalgia. It’s how I stay true to myself.
That because life can end in a split second, how we treat the people we love and how we live are the whole point.
And just like that, life moves forward.
Our time in California was full, and it let us reconnect with family and friends. We couldn’t get to everyone, but I hope we will in the coming months.
For now, we’re in the Cotswolds, my favorite corner of the English countryside. Next week, we’ll be off to Sicily, where we’ll host the first of our last two Gastronomad Experiences of 2026.
I’m endlessly grateful that you continue to join us at the table, whether in person, through these pages, or from wherever in the world you happen to be reading.
We hope to see you in the not-too-distant future. We’ll welcome you with love and open arms and share the zest that makes life so fulfilling, meaningful, joyful, and magical.
In the meantime, I want to meet what comes next the way my uncle has met eighty, with grace and gratitude for every extra year. And I want to meet it the way I hope I’ll always meet a good song: ready to dance, even if only within my heart, until the sun comes up.
I hope I always keep the child, the teenage girl, and the young woman alive in me, no matter how many years pass or how anyone else sees me. I hope to keep every age I’ve ever been, alive within me until my last breath.
With grace, gratitude, and love,
Amira