“Me at 29 and 89″ by Gonzalo Haro

It’s a terrible thing, getting older.

Everyone around you seems to get younger and if this is not offence enough, they have the gall to be smarter, wealthier, fitter, better-looking and more popular as well. It’s like high school all over again. Yet with age, the list of things we aren’t “supposed” to do grows ever the longer. I’m not supposed to laze around anymore; it’s time to get off my butt and make some real money. I’m not supposed to flit from flower to flower; it’s time to settle down and start a family.

It sounds like I’m not supposed to have fun anymore.

Of course, this is all bollocks. Getting older doesn’t have to mean any of these things. If anything, it can mean greater freedom and an increased ability to work on the things you couldn’t have handled before. So why this mood I’m in? I guess it came about earlier last week when one of my mentors sat me down and advised me to do more and get more done while I still can; once I’m his age, he told me, there’ll be so much less I’d be able to do. There was so much real regret in his voice it scared me enough to sit up and actually listen. And think.

Could this be my fate too?

To want so much and to get so little done: have I been wasting too much of my time putting off getting on with my life? Hardly unfair to describe as someone who spends the bulk of his time thinking and thinking again. Not much gets done, no surprise there. There’s always tomorrow, another day, next year, before I hit 30. And the safe self-delusion continues except I realise now that there isn’t anything quite as dangerous.

I have all the tomorrows to come and I don’t. I have today right now and what I have before me. I judge myself and to my sorrow, I find myself wanting. I don’t measure up.

Where have all the dreams gone? Everything that used to matter to me. Too often it’s easier just to put them aside and let go of them. “I can’t get this done now; just leave it.”

Cycle on repeat and it becomes a litany of procrastination, of delayed accomplishments and denied… Denied what? Pleasure? Joy? Some sense of achievement? Are we made whole by what we have done? Why can’t it be enough to be oneself, to live every day as it comes and be satisfied with simply that? Perhaps one can. I’m sure many have managed this. I’m not that enlightened yet though; I still struggle, I still seek.

Take my health for example. Or more precisely, the way I look. Everyone who knows me have heard, for umpteenth times, how I used to be grossly overweight as a kid. The taunting, merciless and righteous. Thing is, now I’m as thin as a rake. Too thin, in fact. Add in falling ill three times in five weeks, and I’m currently the replacement scarecrow for Halloween night.

It’s tough for someone who used to be borderline obese to wrap his head around the fact he now needs to put on weight instead of taking it of. The jokes and teasing return, if from a different angle. Nice how close friends and random strangers can be so kindly cruel. But it got me doing something about it. Took some action. Eating more meals (healthier ones, no sense in gaining weight if it’s all gonna be fat again), changing my weights routine, cutting down on my cardio…

It’d be a long time more before I’m at a healthy, normal weight again, but that’s not the point. I guess the main thing I’ve learned from this is that the old adage is true. The only thing constant about life is change. So I was fat once. It was terrible. I survived. I learned how to deal. Then I got skinny. It’s terrible. I know I’ll survive. I’m learning to deal. Who knows what else the future might bring? Not me.

Maybe this is the only thing I’ve learned from getting older. Things change and I have to keep changing. It’s when I expect things not to change, for them to remain exactly the same, the way I’ve been used to it for awhile, that I become miserable. I can only think of the list of things I can no longer do, I can only think of the things I have not done. All the missed opportunities, lost kisses and broken friendships. All gone, all gone yet never. Stays in my memory like a disease, claws at me every time something turns up to remind me of her, of it, of you…

Maybe I don’t have the tools to deal with this. Maybe I am overwhelmed. (I know I sure feel like this.) But I’m determined to try.

See, life is too glorious to be lived under the shadow of all our doubts. Will she think less of me if I tell her about that? If I behaved this way? If I shared more of myself? Will he laugh at me if I risk opening up myself? Or worse, turn away? Too many doubts, too many questions I’ll never know the answers to, if there are indeed answers in the first place.

Living is a risk in itself. Every breath can bring a new danger, a new possibility of joy and love and happiness. The scent of it can be heady, can be a reckless companion. Makes you greedy and want more of it. And when you don’t, can you go on? (Why not?) Move on, move along. Keep going, take another breathe, keep talking, keep loving, keeping faith with yourself and your fellow men. It’s all good.

It’s a terrible thing, getting older. We don’t have much choice, do we, till the moment we expire, and then there isn’t much more. Not on this plane anyway. What we leave behind, our name, our gifts and blessings… All good but they are for the rest. It’s not about us.

It’s a terrible thing, getting older. But all the more terrible if we don’t do anything while we get older. How terrible it would be, to keep getting older, and forget to live while we’re at it?