Youth and Age

My dear Billy, you’ll pardon me for borrowing this title from your famous poem of the same title in which you extol the merits of being young while you decry all the senior citizens. When I was a teenager, studying that poem, I almost worshipped you for writing that poem, thinking perhaps that I would forever remain young. I particularly loved the two lines where you proclaimed “Age, I do abhor thee,/ Youth, I do adore thee.” However, today in the autumn of my life, when I have almost run the full course of my existence on this earth, I find that I can no longer approve all the crap you wrote in your poem. “No wise man ever wished to be younger,” said Jonathan Swift. Like so many retired people, I have been young, and I know how painful it can be. I have been through the trauma of interminable homework, private tuition and examinations. I know the pangs of having to stay back at home and revise my lessons while the elders in the house go out to have a nice time. I had a most tedious time helping mother in her house chores or running errands, and giving a hand to father in the garden, weeding and watering the flower beds or pruning the hedges. And I must say that I’m among the privileged young persons of my age and locality. I was driven to school by my father when most other boys could not even afford a bicycle. Being young can indeed be a great misery. Just have a look at all those kids who wander about with their struggles, their strife, their feelings of inadequacy and insecurity, their experience of a miserable life which is so bad that they want to put an end to it. We’ve all seen them at the street corners, smoking, drinking, many of them on drugs, with no jobs to go to. Others are cruelly exploited by adults and made to toil hard for a mere pittance. If they don’t work, they don’t eat. Many have to make a financial contribution to the family’s meagre income. Children suffer greatly when they are forced to perform like “small adults.” The child’s creativeness and ability to transcend reality are blunted and his whole mental world is impoverished. The young migrant worker of Brazil learns the etiquette of farm work at a tender age. He doesn’t know how to play, he works ten hour days, he smokes and drinks. Physically he is an adult, but mentally he is completely and forever a child. Children who must work develop a keen sense of survival. Youths in Africa, Latin America and Asia traffic in babies, drugs and prostitution. Young Brazilians and Columbians play with knives and automatic pistols at an age when they should be playing with toys. Child labour constitutes a real moral danger as working juveniles grow into illiterate adults. On the other hand, the older you get, the better you get, unless you are a banana. As you grow you learn more. If you stayed at eighteen, you’d always be as ignorant as you were at eighteen. Ageing is not just decay. It’s growing. It’s more than the negative that you’re going to die, it’s also the positive that you understand you’re going to die and that you live a better life because of it. The older you grow, the fewer your needs. The worries, anxieties, and uncertainties of the unknown are well behind you. You have no examinations to prepare for you are far away from the rat race and the struggle for living and making it to the top. You are ready to live a happy, fulfilled life You have fewer responsibilities in the midst of the family as your own kids have become grown up and have taken over. You have no office routine to attend. With fewer cares and obligations you have more time for leisure activities like reading, writing, outings, with friends, watching your grandchildren grow up. In a single day you can find yourself as small as your granddaughter, as adult as your son and discussing plans and projects with him, and attending board meetings where your experience and advice is sought and solicited. Your age is respected and the wisdom you have acquired through the years is venerated. You often hear people say, “Oh, if I were young again.” You know what that reflects? Unsatisfied lives. Unfulfilled lives. Lives that haven’t found meaning. Because if you’ve found meaning in your life, you don’t want to go back. You want to go forward, you want to see more, and enjoy life all the more.  If you’re always battling against getting older, you’re always going to be unhappy because it will happen anyway, and eventually you are going to die anyway. To know how to grow old is, I believe, the masterwork of wisdom and one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living.