You can’t always get what you want...

I’m going to share this young woman’s experience, as a reminder that so much of life is about perspective.

Let’s call our young woman Jenny. That’s not her real name, but it will do. Currently in her late-teens, and incredibly articulate and intelligent, she has always wanted to be older and has always lamented the fact that as the youngest child, all her brothers and sisters have had, and experienced, everything, before she has and consequently has had a ‘hand-me-down’ life experience. I don’t think she is at all bitter about it but finds it irksome more so than cause for regret.

“It’s funny really, all I have ever wanted to do was to grow up, or be grown up, and do all the things that adults take for granted,” Jenny told me.

“Like being able to go out wherever and whenever they want and eat what they want, when they feel like it. I mean, there are times when I want an avocado spread on toasted brown whole-wheat bread, something healthy and ummm, vibrant. Other times I want biryani, or some lovely fish (I’m not really into chicken), and occasionally I just want to roll my sleeves up and polish off a whole anchovy pizza, all on my own.” She laughed out loud at that, betraying the fact that she had done so, at some time during her young past.

Jenny went on, “Like being able to stay out late, or even stay up late, or go to bed early. Or to sleep-in and throw my alarm clock away instead of just tapping the snooze button and delaying the inevitable. Like being able to choose clothes of a style and fashion that suit their build and complexion, of colours and styles that they like, that suit them, and reflect their personality.

“Like being able to drive a car. Maybe even to select the car they want, either a big car to keep them safe, or a neat little ‘town car,’ in a feminine pink, yellow or fluorescent green. A car that tells the world exactly who they are. How cool would that be?”

She expresses so well her enthusiasm for life, her personality, and her individuality there for all to see, and yet here is this girl, in such a hurry to grow up, it clearly causes her some angst. Then, as she picked at a cookie she said, in a very grown-up, yet childish way, furrowing her brow… “I do remember though, while all I’ve wanted is to grow up, and yet it sometimes seems I never will.”

Pondering a moment, Jenny asked, “How is that for irony? All I want to do is get older, while Mum worries about getting older. She says she wishes she didn’t feel so old, that she wasn’t so stiff and sore in the mornings, and that she wasn’t putting on weight and losing her figure. She worries about gray hairs, bags under her eyes, and crow’s feet. She wishes she were younger, while I wish I were older. How crazy is that?” Not at all, as it’s all about perspective? If you are 6 feet tall, whether you are associating with basketballers or jockeys dictates whether you are, in that moment, short or tall. It’s all about perspective, and like Sara and her mother, young and old are also matters of perspective.

There is nothing that will accelerate youth except age, and it appears there is no elixir of youth for the more mature.

But ye of tender years, and tender maturity take hope, for to paraphrase Carolyn Hart… “The true elixir of youth is expectation, with its grandeur, its glory, its magnificent hopes and dreams, enhancing the belief that all things are yet possible.”