Age - Gifts

 Take what you Like and Leave the Rest

Each age gives it's own gifts, but it is not realistic to generalize. All twelve-year olds do not re-act the same way to being twelve. All sixty-year olds do not re-act the same way to being sixty.

Each of us is unique in our experiences. And each one of us here must answer for ourselves how this particular age feels in our own personal lives.

The great American obsession with youth is very strange. The young are the standard for beauty. Yet is it not true that each age brings it's own beauty? A babe is bald and bowl-legged and toothless, and we call that beautiful.  If that same child were to have those characteristics at twenty, he or she would be far from beautiful.

Each age does bring it's own beauty.

Yet we, as a society, label the beauty of only one age as the beauty we should all endeavor to have, as if it were possible to stop your body from its rightful journey through time.

I have earned my wrinkles, and I like them.  I am not quite so fond of my double chin and jowls, but they too are my friends. I would not look twenty again, for that would be to deny to myself the wisdom and the joy I have gained.  And, it would be false advertising.

But it should be added that although we honor youth as beauty, we also deny that youth has wisdom. That is unfair, it seems to me. If we see that each age has its own beauty, then surely each age has its own wisdom as well, to teach us. Yet we often fall into the trap of thinking that some ages have no knowledge, that they have nothing to teach us once we ourselves are removed from them. Certain ages are not valid, the feelings and emotions somehow, do not count.

Why is this? Simply because we as adults know that certain youthful experiences will pass, does not mean that they are not painful or valid while someone is there.

Surely the point where we are in life, wherever it is, this point too shall pass. Yet our time is valid while we are here.

It is where we are now.   Let us not waste the experience.