A few days after I published my recent blog entry “On Ageing – Age is just a number”, I received comments from friends (both verbal and written), heaping praises on me that I had finally seen the light, that there is no need to rush through life as if there is no tomorrow, and that I should finally stop putting pressure on myself to get on with ‘the important things in life’.
Now, while I still hold onto the opinion that age is just a number, I believe some of my readers have misconstrued my words to mean “take your time with life, there is no rush”. On the contrary, if you read and understand carefully what I wrote, what I meant was “live life to the maximum, as if there is no tomorrow”.
I believe there is such a thing as a natural cycle of life. There are periods in life where you do certain things. And if, for any reason, you did not get down to doing those things during that period as allocated by Nature, then you bite the bullet and let it go. Attempting to “live out your youth” when you are already in the adult phase, is an invitation for disaster. You know why? Because it all starts to stack up and snowball on you. You drag your youthful lifestyle all the way into your physical adult life. And then when you have entered your thirties, you suddenly realise, “Oops, I have not actually gotten down to living my young adult life yet, because I was so caught up being blissfully youthful back in my twenties”. And them you struggle to live out your twenties life when you are already in your thirties. The result is, you end up playing a lifetime of catch-up, never actually living your natural age.
What I am basically saying is this: There is a time to be a kid. There is a time to be a teenager. There is a time to be a yuppie. There is a time to date. There is a time to get married. There is a time to have kids. There is a time to watch the kids grow up. There is a time to grow old. To live those phases or life too early or too late can be really jangling to the soul. You feel as if you are totally out of sync with your physical and psychological self.
You start to look around. You see your friends happily married with kids, and you wonder what the f**k you were doing in your mid-to-late twenties, blissfully squandering the years on youthful endeavours that, no doubt life-enriching, should really have been out the window when you were in your teens or in college. And then you take a good hard look at the last ten years, and realise that you have allowed your life to go on auto-cruise, and the boat has gone way off-course.
By all means, live your life to the full, experience all that life has to offer. But while you are doing all that, it is worthwhile to keep regular tabs on what phase of life you are in at the moment, and what are those basic things you should be doing. And if you have already missed out on any of those phases, perhaps it would do well for you to just let it go, move on and get with the programme.
2 comments:
There's a time for everything? If that's the case, age is not 'just' a number, is it? Are you not contradicting yourself?
No, Wendy, I am not contradicting myself. Allow me to illustrate my point with a simple example:
Let's say you were an avid tennis as a teenager in high school. Then you reach adulthood, get married and have children. Does that mean you automatically stop playing tennis, even though your body can still allow you to, just because you think you are "past that stage"?
The trouble with the majority of us Asians (no apology called for here, as I am Asian myself) is that we do not the zest to live life. We make neither the time nor the effort.
By all means, get married and have kids. But don't forget to live life to the fullest, too. They are all a part of the cycle of life.
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