The other day, Melissa and I were working, checking out templates for our new, and hopefully improved, website. I started playing around on one of them (you know how when you run your arrow over a menu selection, it makes a funny noise and gets bigger or something?) and she looked at me (with love in her eyes!) and said “You’re such a child!”
I took that as a huge compliment, but I’m really pretty sure she didn’t mean it completely like that!
Let me share one very important fact with you: Melissa is still in that Thirty-something stage (youngster!), while I am deep into my Forty-something stage. I only mention that because here is one thing I have observed about how we age:
- When we are in our teens, we think we know everything and we
can’t wait to grow up. - When we are in our twenties, we realize we knew NOTHING while in our teens. We are feeling very grown up now because we have real jobs and our own apartments and pay our own taxes now. However, we actually feel we have some insight, perhaps because we work with older (ahem – in their thirties!) people who are much more tied down, so we realize that now is the time to have fun. And we do!
- Suddenly, we are the ones in our thirties, and realize that we knew NOTHING in our twenties. We have families and mortgages
and pets and mini-vans. We chide ourselves for wasting time by having had TOO much fun in our twenties, and try to compensate by being VERY grown up. Sometimes it seems that the word FUN is rarely in our vocabulary anymore. Okay, I’m exaggerating, but there are times that it seems as though we are so busy trying make something of ourselves, that we tend to have tunnel-vision. - Then we’re in our forties. Maybe our kids are older, maybe we waited to have families until we were older ourselves, maybe life just threw
us a curve ball or two. But by now our life experiences have taught us that we need to have more fun! We know that we don’t know everything, and we know that we never will. We’re learning (hopefully) how to prioritize the big things in life, and how not to “sweat the small stuff.”
As my brilliant (she made me say that!) sister said, “We are not childish, we are child-like.” And I think that’s a great way to be!
Karen
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That's exactly what I meant, K! :-)
ReplyDelete40 something year too but with a glitch. While one kid is out of the house, we still have a 7 and a 5 year old. :) So the fun for me comes in spurts. Mostly at home. But I've been stretching my legs recently. Taking a class every Sunday. Not a big deal for some but HUGE for me. I get to get out. Alone. Just me. No kids in the back seat arguing or trying to talk to me over the radio. WTF is with that anyway? Don't they do enough talking at home? My one time that they're actually strapped in and relatively immobile and they have to ruin my musical interlude? Okay, tangent over.
ReplyDeleteYeah I agree. I just want to have fun. And I don't see myself ever really growing up.