Ages and Ages

It's amazing to me how relative something like a number of years can be. We speak of an era like it were the blink of an eye. The older times are just the same to us and in many cases encompass a century. Weird how so many different values can be attributed to a single word. Ten or eleven years. A very short stint in the big picture of history. Simply the blink of an eye again. As you live your life, it seems like an eternity. Eleven years go by and it almost unfolds as a smaller life written within your larger one. So much can mold you in that time. How is it possible then that a person who is that much younger can connect with you? Perhaps they can't, and we just try to justify it as that. Or perhaps two people's minds can be on the same page even if their ages are not. Still, as we get older, and more of our own lives become history, the gap shrinks almost into extinction. A person 41 and one 30 we may look at and say, "They make such a great couple." Yet if we are to rewind the clock, and they are 15 years younger each, we become judgemental and now we say, "That's disgusting!" Why is it so disgusting, so revolting? Not because history tells us it is. If we look back in time, it was common. And still we don't call those people from those times disgusting, we call them a civilization. The root of this word being "civil." They're just as much if not more civilized than we ourselves. But we're too vain to look at it that way. Because at some point in time, we regarded someone in society so highly, that we embraced their views as the standard for our own. Who's to say that they are really correct? My contention would be that they are blinded by their own misconceptions. Maybe I'm confused and need a reality check. It wouldn't be the first time and, me being human, I would hate for it to mark the last. If it does, I stop learning.