Youth
I don’t know if this bit of my life – this ambiguous ‘youth’ stage – will feel like a blink or more than a blink by the time life is all said and done. In moments I don’t feel young. Many moments I don’t understand what it means to be young at all. I feel weathered by life already. I have seen many places and met many people. I have learned that there is always something that comes next as long as I am breathing, which is something I had no grid for even a few years ago. Some days I feel like I have life by the horns, and some days it feels like it has me by the horns. I even have gray hairs on my head! That must be a sign that this 22 years has been robust in ways that have grown me older than my baby face allows onlookers to understand.
I think youth is the time before the concrete of “real life” has hardened in the mold of life’s foundation.
Regardless of how I feel, I know I am young still. I know it because there are so many unexplored territories of life that hold unquenchable power in my imagination: Marriage, sex, a steady paycheck, kids, success in concrete and fleshly terms… All these things can still claim to be the answer to everything that my life is about. I haven’t lived long enough to find out that they aren’t. Maybe that is why people rave about youth.
The bundles in our young hands unravel upward to balloons that are still floating innocently in the sky above our heads. I get the feeling that people who have lived longer find themselves more often than they would like hunched over collecting the little torn bits of rubber that are left after those balloons pop. I get the feeling that many of those hunched over people look at me in my youth and think “If only I could go back to those days when the balloons hadn’t popped, I could do it right and they would never pop.” I hear grief leaking out between their words when they marvel over my youth and try to convince me that it is the most valuable time of life.
I don’t agree with this outlook, though. I think that these balloons were meant to be popped. As long as there are years left to live there will be balloons that are popped. And it might not always be by disappointment! It might be by joy and fullness that looks different than I first thought. It might be tragedy or something less harsh but just as befuddling. It could really be anything. At this point in time I am still sitting on the unmarked end of what might be a string of these tragedies, disappointments and joys – and that, I think, is why they gush.
Here is how I think about it: Gravity and entropy are forces at work on our physical realities all the time, altering, changing, and securing things. Age is the force at work on our mental [balloon] pictures of what life will be. It is a natural force: why fight it?
I may be young, and I may have a flock of balloons above my head that I can’t chase away. But hear this older people, “not youth” and youth alike: those balloons will not be the point of my life. The sky above them is the point. You can rave all you want about my youth and how I don’t know how valuable it is, and I’ll miss it someday. I don’t care. I don’t plan on missing it. I plan on enjoying every gray hair, wrinkle and every popped balloon. I also plan on enjoying every moment until those other moments come. I plan to find life and joy in the undiscovered moments of every day, whether I’ve crossed the big finish lines of life or not and regardless of how desperate and disappointed they or their absence leave me feeling.
I will live for life itself, and not for the ideas and pictures and possibilities that cloak themselves in the disguise of “answers” to all that I am doubtful of and anxious about.
