august 11 one
When you're young, you don't know what it's like to not be young, and even though a lot of the time being young sucks, you grow up with some kind of knowledge that when you are not so young you will look back upon the days that you were young with wistfulness and longing. "Youth is wasted on the young," some oldster says, and you believe him, because he's old and he knows stuff, when all he's really saying is he misses not having to pay bills.
I don't know what happens between being young and being old, but what I do know is that people who peak in high school have nowhere to go but down, which is where many of them end up. I did not peak in high school and in a lot of ways I am still on my way up because (to my surprise and delight) I have discovered that getting older is a gift that keeps on giving. I used to dread getting older because I only saw aging through the lens of all the things I wouldn't be able to do, or at least wouldn't be able to do as well (or as easily, or as cheaply, or as frequently). All I could see were the drawbacks, and most of those drawbacks were related to specific things that I thought were important when I was at whatever age I was. I didn't even allow for the possibility that I would change, that I would want new things, or that I would or even could stop enjoying things that I was at that time enjoying.
When I was 28, I figured I'd smoke and drink forever, which is one of the reasons I smoked for 20 years and almost drank myself into oblivion. It wasn't even that I wanted to do those things as much as it was that I had perilously low self-esteem and no real goals other than to write a book at some point and, as such, could not imagine anything better than smoking a cigarette with my coffee in the morning, and, as a result, never did.
NB: This isn't as much a continuation of yesterday's post which stopped abruptly when I got too tired to end it elegantly, as much as it is something of a spiritual successor.
🌲 gonna the reward
🌼 go for
🌱 touch good work
🌳 grass is
🌷 now more work
Be good to yourself.
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