The essence of youth

Where does youth end and middle age set in? When I was 20 I felt really young and grown up at the same time.  The fact that money was running scarce and I had to uphold two jobs, one of which in a coffeeshop, didn’t make the slightest difference. In fact, it made me feel all the more grown-up. Hanging out with older friends was another thing that defined youth. Because the elders wisdom is seeking the youngers radiance. Having both is rare so by joining forces we both ensured wisdom and youth in equal measures.

I had Victoria when I was 21. It’s an age which most people would consider being on right side of youth. I felt different. Not that I regretted anything, but it made me pass from young to grown up, almost over night. I had lived through events in two years that some people don’t experience in 10, so it was natural to feel old. In fact I didn’t have many friends my age, making it difficult to compare, but seeing my female counter parts in clubs, on the beach or at work, it was obvious I had passed the line to middle age with senility as the next stop.

I did everything to maintain myself, at least on a physical level. I was on a permanent diet, I ran and I worked out daily to Claudia Schiffer and Cindy Crawford’s stay-in-shape videos. The pregnancy kilos came off, but yet my body was covered in “battle wounds” that the average 21 year old had not.

Today I wish I would have enjoyed that period more than I allowed myself to. Because that youth is so beautiful and so precious, something we can never get back. It’s not about how many years our body has lived and endured (which after all can be surgically manipulated) but how the years have corrupted our mind.

Today I am 32 and trust me there is a day when you wake up and look yourself in the mirror and you feel old. Today is not that day, but I have had those days many times before, and there will be many more to come.

Why am I saying all this? Well the notion of youth and the onset of age is not something new. Not to me nor as a worldly concept. But as of late I have had,  primarily men and in one instance my own daughter, reflecting on my changing body and best wishes for getting back into shape again. I can assure you, I haven’t gone wild with the kilos and although I feel like an elephant I am not (still maintaining myself on the right side, which is in fact the left side, of 70kg). It’s not so much their remarks that disturbs me but the fact that we are all being judged by our youth and appearance, which with those statements became so blatantly obvious.

Although I am not there yet, in wisdom or experience, I do believe the essence of youth has in fact nothing to do with age. It’s not the absence of years that makes us young. It’s the wisdom of experience that does. When that experience is applied to our future. Because as long as there is future, there is youth.

junior and senior