No one ever really writes too explicitly about the effects of age on the human mind. I mean sure, there are a hundred and one accounts of how wisdom descends upon your unknowing, unprepared self with each birthday and teaches you what life is truly about. But in my eyes, such words are too succinct and too distant; they give you such a third-person's view of the whole thing that it makes you feel like this is something that only happens to people on paper. (That's the thing about literature, it can assume such an intellectual pose that you start to feel meek and stupid when you read it and begin to wish for the writer to get off his high horse).
No one ever writes about such things with that alarming honesty which you need to sense in prose so as to actually go ahead and believe the writer when he says that you won't always stay young, that age actually does matter, that no one can be Peter Pan in the real world. I won't be a pessimist and say that you start loving life lesser with the appearance of wrinkles and grey hair; that truly depends upon your brain, your thinking, and on the reservoirs of hope and happiness you carry (or don't carry) within yourself. You can love your life more over time, with the arrival of true love, good friends, material comforts and a deeper comfort under your own skin. In fact I'd go ahead and say that these things do happen for most of us.
I'm more at peace with myself than I was two years ago (knock on wood, please!) and that's largely because of certain leaps of faith I allowed myself to take in a youthful abandon which our twenties are infamous for.
In any case, age will undoubtedly break your innocence into a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle which stays splattered on the floor of your mind and stares at you with confused eyes and a questioning look, almost as if to ask you what's going to happen next. And as the dots connect with time, you find the answer to that question, and the innocence which you once wore unconsciously on your sleeve slips further away into an all-consuming whirlpool where your past will live on.
There will be photographs to remind you what certain memorable days were like, old dresses which will remind you how thin you once were, sepia videos which will remind you how your grandfather sounded when he was the man of the house, moth-eaten pages from your journals which will make you smile at your naivety. And through all this, you will be informed of where you started from and how far you've come.
Life will go on and you will age without knowing it. That's the way the cookie crumbles, that's the way this story goes.
No one ever writes about such things with that alarming honesty which you need to sense in prose so as to actually go ahead and believe the writer when he says that you won't always stay young, that age actually does matter, that no one can be Peter Pan in the real world. I won't be a pessimist and say that you start loving life lesser with the appearance of wrinkles and grey hair; that truly depends upon your brain, your thinking, and on the reservoirs of hope and happiness you carry (or don't carry) within yourself. You can love your life more over time, with the arrival of true love, good friends, material comforts and a deeper comfort under your own skin. In fact I'd go ahead and say that these things do happen for most of us.
I'm more at peace with myself than I was two years ago (knock on wood, please!) and that's largely because of certain leaps of faith I allowed myself to take in a youthful abandon which our twenties are infamous for.
In any case, age will undoubtedly break your innocence into a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle which stays splattered on the floor of your mind and stares at you with confused eyes and a questioning look, almost as if to ask you what's going to happen next. And as the dots connect with time, you find the answer to that question, and the innocence which you once wore unconsciously on your sleeve slips further away into an all-consuming whirlpool where your past will live on.
There will be photographs to remind you what certain memorable days were like, old dresses which will remind you how thin you once were, sepia videos which will remind you how your grandfather sounded when he was the man of the house, moth-eaten pages from your journals which will make you smile at your naivety. And through all this, you will be informed of where you started from and how far you've come.
Life will go on and you will age without knowing it. That's the way the cookie crumbles, that's the way this story goes.
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