Monday, June 15, 2009

Growing old...

It feels weird to get old. Not the kind of old that means gray hair and grandchildren, but the adult kind of old, the feeling that keeps reminding me that childhood is gone. The playfulness, the laughter, it’s still there, but it’s different; the world has changed. It’s the kind of old that watches individual friends become families, the kind of old that needs high heels and leather portfolios for graduate school or job interviews, the kind of old that has to take all the dreams of childhood and actually make a decision about what I want to be when I grow up. It’s the kind of old that brought my brother and I to sit on the porch for two hours last night talking. We talked about relationships and dreams, but as we talked I realized that we were no longer speaking with the voices of children but of adults and that our hopes were no longer just dreams but possibilities. It was the feeling of the world becoming tangible.

I’m not sure how I feel about getting old. Some days I miss the weightless years of childhood when my only tasks were only to dream, play and learn. Some days I like being grown, facing a world of endless possibilities with the power to make some of them come true. Some days…

As I face the reality of getting old, I wonder if it is possible to retain both worlds, that of a child and that of an adult. I ponder if I need both worlds, if I can’t live fully without them. Perhaps this is the secret of getting old, to stand between two realities and plant a foot in each, to combine the authority and resources of getting older with the innocence, trust and faith of a child, to blend the power to dream with the power to create. I think what scares me most about getting old is that so many adults seem to be too tired to play, that sometimes I too am already too tired to play. I never want to lose the ability to laugh really hard, to run through the grass with bare feet and loose hair, to play in the rain, to dream of things beyond myself—the ability to be young even when I am old.

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