Tuesday, August 16, 2005
Carved in Stone
"How life finally beats the youth out of us
leaving us with wisdom and sensibility....
The lines that I will no longer cross
are the ones I treasure most."
--Jann Arden
As my years soak into me...
I begin to really cherish being soaked.
I think about how my family and friends have tumbled through the years together, and about all the relationships that have come and gone... where are these people now? What did their lives become?
Do they ever think about what they took away with them from our shared experience? I wonder. I don't think I actually want to know what they took away with them. It's like being shown how a magic trick works: It's so disappointing and your memory of the event is forever colored by the reality of knowing how it actually happened.
I think about the following: The blind optimism of youth, There are more fish in the sea, One bad apple don't spoil the whole bunch. People cavalierly discard relationships and friendships as if they grew in vast berry fields, free for the picking. "This one has a bad spot, so I'll just toss it." Imagine the richness and value we'd all cultivate if we were alotted a certain number of people per life and told:
"That's it. It's gotta last, so make it work. Make good and put your best into every relationship. Understand, love and cherish these people. They're all you get."
Maybe it does work that way, and we haven't the scope and foresight to see this. People give up too easily. These lyrics to an Indigo Girls' song, The Power of Two, ring so true to me, even 12 years after I originally heard them:
It’s that we loved each other well
Cause I’ve seen the shadows
of so many people
Trying on the treasures of youth
But a road that fancy and fast
Ends in a fatal crash
And I’m glad we got off
To tell you the truth
All the shiny little
trinkets of temptation (make new friends)
Something new
instead of something old
All you gotta do is
scratch beneath the surface
And it’s fools gold
It's not easy to carve those things in stone that really matter, and to write those trivial ego-things in sand where they wash cleanly away. If it were, we'd still have just about every friend we ever made. And the divorce rate would be lower.
The treasures of youth are fool's gold, lionized, lauded and applauded by the media. And the media would like us to feel badly about aging, about outgrowing the fool's gold of youth. I'm not buying it. I'm happy to grow beyond it and resist it as best I can.
~Shephard :)
Labels: Life Skills
posted by Shephard @ 