Things that once mattered a great deal may matter a lot less as you grow older.

At different points in life, different things matter more or less than they once did. Thank goodness our priorities as adolescents continue to evolve.

At each stage of life, the things that are more important and those that are less important tend to shift. While this is clearly a subjective assessment, I would suggest the following 11 items are among those that change as we age. Each reflects changes that are most commonly associated with making an increasingly healthier adjustment to life as we age.

• Concern about what others think about us. Common in youth, this tends to decrease as we get more comfortable acclimating (finally!) to who we really are and commensurately less reliant on being liked and approved of by others.

• Preoccupation with appearances diminishes. How things and people look tends to become appreciably less important than how we once thought about them.

• Pressure to do things as quickly as possible shifts. Doing things as well as possible tends to overtake the more youthful concern with doing things as quickly as possible.

• Less of our identity is connected with our jobs. Identity becomes more evidently separable from what we do or did for a living.

• “Old” friends become increasingly important. Those with whom we share some common history take on a level of importance as self-reference unimaginable in earlier life.

• Health is no longer taken for granted. The good health many of us enjoyed and came to expect in youth becomes an acutely valued gift to be cherished and cultivated.

• Remorse for errors made in the past gradually shifts to learning and altered behavior. The guilt and shame associated with past errors in judgment and misguided decisions can become a fertile culture in which to nurture continuing evolution as a person.

• Giving becomes at least as important as getting. Our feelings of self-value become increasingly connected with our ability and willingness to be of help to others.

• Being truthful, both with ourselves and with others, becomes increasingly important — but not without sensitivity and tact.

• Love becomes more an act of selflessness than one of physical or even emotional reciprocity. Expecting and needing tit-for-tat for any act taken diminishes in importance, as does the need to be acknowledged and “thanked” for every good thing one does.

• Life becomes an experience more directly connected with the here and now of today than it did when it seemed to be indelibly tied to yesterday and motivated by what we hoped would come tomorrow.

At the risk of sounding trite, today is special — that’s why we call it “the present.” Yesterday is a memory; tomorrow, wishes, fears and hopes. Today is what is for sure.

David Reinstein is a San Anselmo resident. IJ readers are invited to share their stories of love, dating, parenting, marriage, friendship and other experiences for our How It Is column, which runs Tuesdays in the Lifestyles section. All stories must not have been published in part or in its entirety previously. Send your stories of no more than 600 words to lifestyles@marinij.com. Please write How It Is in the subject line. The IJ reserves the right to edit them for publication. Please include your full name, address and a daytime phone number.