When you're younger your mind concentrates on growing up or being old. It's always what you are going to do when you grow up, who you are going to be when you're old. But to me getting old isn't about graduating high school and college, or getting a job. Getting old is about your sold maturing and changing. Some people believe that growing up can occur in an instant or over the course of a few rough days where your world changes. I don't think that to be true, I believe growing up takes a lifetime.
I'm seventeen and only just begun to grow up. There are a few things in everyone's life that alter their rate of growing up and getting older.
Experiencing the phenomenon of another life entering the world causes a guardedly of growing in the soul. Some people worry about the pain, and the drugs, the defects. But to me there is nothing about birth other than beauty. I watched my mom laboriously bring my baby sister into this world, ad it was one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen. Something so beautiful entering a world that can be so ugly changed my outlook on the lives around me. Emily was absolutely perfect, she was helpless, and I was there to protect her. I grew more grown knowing that this perfect little baby was going to grow up with me around, and guiding her through the things I was going through. Now she tells me I'm her role model, and that in itself cause me to be old.
How does one know when love is pure and when love is not? I don't think there is one specific answer to any question about love. Love is a feeling, love is a moment, and love can be a life. Love effects every aspect of every person's life. Some people just don't get enough and it causes them great pain and suffering, it can cause them to lash out at those who have love. Some people are blessed with an over abundance of love, and it causes them to share with eerie person they meet. This is because too much is just enough, if not too little. I have enough love from my friends and my family to last me my lifetime, or at least the next couple of years. But when a person has this much love, it's hard not to share. Learning the truth abou twelve and what it entails means that a person has grown, and become older.
Changing causes a lot of terrot to some people, while other people just crave the constance changing of lives. Changing causes the mind and soul to readjust in their new settings. This readjustment brings a lot of chara ter traits that are essential in the lives of anyone getting old. This change can be moving, transferring jobs or any person in your life leaving. I haven't quite had this part of my life yet. I've wached my friends adapt to their changes and they all deall differently with them. I see how it has changed them. WHen Kt's paren'ts divorced, she spiraled helplessfly for a while, but then she became better. I watched her become stronger and more independent and at the same tim I watched her learn to rely more on the people she knew she could trust. Through those years I watched her become old.
As people grow older they obtain wisdome, patience, and knowledge. These are all acquired by the gaining of years. The process cannot be sped up, and it is on a different time line for each person. Without getting older a person lacks a serenity that comes with age. Getting older for some may be turning sixty while for others it may be turning six. There are many children in the world with more widome than many middle-aged people. It's just a matter of who the person is and how fast they are growing up.
I had not really experienced the true tragedy and loss involved in death until i was abou twelve or thirteen. I los tmy great-grandpa in July, it really hit me then just how much I take for granted, and how much I needed to marvel in those moments. Then in August I lost a close family friend, the horse he was riding had fallen on him and killed him, but not instantly. He was only a few hundred yards away. I watched my mom and Aunt give him CPR for what seem liked hours, then life support trying desperately to get him to the hospital to save him, and I saw the medics give up and just let him go. That Junauary I lost my great-grandma, we weren't close but I still regretted the time I just gave up on her. Through the course of the next few years, more of my family has died. My favorite uncle succumbed to a long battle with cancer, a battle that I watched him slowly deteriorate through. It was a battle I would have fiven my life to stop for him. I love my other great-grandma; a woman whose strength I marveled at and loved my whole life. It's difficult for me to belive that any of these wonderful people are gone, from my life forever but I knwo they are, and I know that in their passing they helped me grow.
Birth, love, change, getting old and death are what defines growing up. I don' tthink a single person is ever done growing up until the minute before they die. Thus, it is impossible for a person to be "old" until that moment as well. This is because until that moment, a person has never stopped learning, seeing, changing or acquiring life. In that final breath a person is grown up completely and fulfilled all of their potential. That moment is when you are old.

(written N/A

Revise Fall 2004)