Amaranthine

If youth is wasted on the young, middle age is to be savored by its inhabitants.  While it might be nice to have smooth thighs, an unlined face and naturally blond hair, honestly, you couldn’t pay me to be a kid again or to go back to adolescence.  There’s not enough money in the world for that.  Medusa, complete with snakes in her hair, defined my teenage experience.  Don’t let the hint of a smile deceive you.  I was mostly miserable, and made everyone around me miserable.  I could turn you to stone in a heartbeat.

I am a late bloomer, and as such, I have a special place in my heart for other late bloomers.  And a firm belief that it is never too late to go after a dream. 

My new book club recently finished reading “Memoirs of a Geisha” by Arthur Golden.  It’s rich with subject matter for my blog, which you’ll see more of in future posts, but what I want to consider now is the idea that our dreams don’t die when we leave our youth behind.

The main character in the book, Sayuri, has led a hard life.  In her training as a geisha, her mentor who is somewhat jaded by her own experience, admonishes Sayuri for her dreams, saying,   “Hopes are like hair ornaments.  Girls want to wear too many of them.  When they become old women they look silly wearing even one.”

I have to disagree.  I’m trying very hard to consider life as a continuum, not a story with a beginning, middle and end.  Sure, we are all aging.  We’re aging from the moment we exit the womb.  But life itself is one experience after another.  Society has put definitions to it that relate to chronological age.  That doesn’t mean we need to abide by them.  Nor does it mean we have to give up on our dreams just because our bones creak or our hair is gray. We all get to choose how we’re going to experience this life. 

I like to think I get to keep moving from one interest to another, and at some point it will have to end. The fact that most of us are not given any advance warning of our impending death tells me we just need to keep on living life as if we have some time.  Stopping short in an attempt to align the sunset of my dreams with the digging of my grave seems futile, and a doleful waste of time. 

What about choosing to look at middle age as a time of incredible freedom?  Not a mid-life crisis where we need to buy sports cars or Botox to convince ourselves we're still young, but a time to capitalize on the gifts of wisdom and confidence that allow us to articulate  our dreams and go after them, pedal to the metal.

Life changes constantly.  One of the road blocks of youth is the inability to recognize, let alone embrace, this fact.  It’s so hard to visualize what’s in front of us when we live in the moment, unable to see beyond the teacher we can’t stand or the classmate who seems out to get us.  We haven’t seen enough to know that life moves up and down like the waves of the ocean. Wasn’t it King Solomon who said, somewhere around 900 BC, “This too shall pass”?

So if youth is blind, or at least experiences blurry vision about the future, how can we be expected to know what we want to do with the rest of our lives at 17?  It can’t be too late to figure this out in our 30’s, 40’s or 70’s for that matter.

I talked to a woman this weekend who, by the way, makes a plethora of beautiful hair ornaments for her daughters in spite of the fact that they sometimes appear to shun them for snakes. She is contemplating doing something for herself.  Her children are leaving the nest. From my vantage point, she’s put her family first in every move she’s made for the past 20 years.  It’s her turn now, but I hear doubt in her voice as to whether she’s capable of achieving her dreams. I hope she’s not thinking she’s too old to proudly wear her own sparkling hair ornament.   I, for one, have all the faith in the world in her.

Maybe I’ll feel differently about all of this in another twenty years.  I can’t speak for old age today, but I do vividly remember my uncle, in his early 70’s at the time, saying that he looks at himself in the mirror sometimes and can’t believe what he sees because he feels 17 inside.

I like that.  The upside of 17 is the belief that you are invincible.