“Nobody grows old merely by a number of years. We grow old by deserting our ideals. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul.”
Samuel Ullman, Youth
Beyond the Quote (307/365)
Forget about your age already. Who cares what your number is? Why live your life according to the number of times you’ve traveled around the sun? Once you’ve reached adulthood, that number of sun revolutions is arbitrary. 25 Times? 40 Times? 60 Times? What of it?
Sure, there are natural consequences to further travel—it’ll wrinkle the skin. But, the skin wrinkling should have no affect on the vibrance of the soul. The soul is ageless. It is timeless. It is forever young. That is, until we start telling it otherwise.
You have to ask yourself whether your number is what makes you feel old or if you feel old and then realize you’re at that number. My guess would be the former. I see it all of the time. “At 30 times around the sun, I should start acting and feeling like this.” “At 50 times, I should start acting and feeling like that.” And so on.
But, this doesn’t have to be the case. I’m sure you’ve met a young spirit in a well traveled body before. What more proof do you need? They are is a testament to the essence of the human spirit—that it is ageless. It is only the case that some people’s spirits have been dimmed, neglected, hardened, ignored, and given false wrinkles. Why false wrinkles? Because real wrinkles do not appear on the spirit! It is an absurd thought.
And yet, here we are surrounded by seas of just that—wrinkled spirits. People who have deserted their ideals. Abandoned their enthusiasm. Given up on their dreams. Told themselves that acting a certain way is childish and that it is below them. They have become an old traveler by choice, not by consequence. And they have placed the wrinkles on the soul like a person dressing up on Halloween.
What you need to know is this: the wrinkles on your soul are no more than just that—Halloween costume decorations. They can be removed and it can be done in a matter of moments. Poof! Your spirit can exude the same ageless enthusiasm that it once did before you decided to stop. Some of you will have a harder time doing this than others.
You have been wearing the costume for so long! Heck, some of you have been wearing the costume longer than you have been out of the costume! The costume has become your identity! How to just, “take off” the costume that you and others have come to associate you with? It isn’t that easy.
…Ah, but it really is. The costume is just as easy to take off after one day as it is after 1,000 days. How could it not be? It’s just a matter of choice and your willingness to break the momentum that you have built for so long. And once you decide to finally break it, you will need to reacquaint with your ageless soul for it may seem foreign to you at first. But, in my estimation, reacquainting won’t take long.
If you get stuck, ask yourself who you want to be. This is the fundamental practice. Do you want to be the person who can get excited at a piece of foil that’s shown to you by an enthusiastic child? Or do you want to be the person who is too busy “adulting” to care? Do you want to be able to play imaginary games with your kids or would you rather let them do that in the other room? Would you rather maintain your thirst for knowledge, experience, and adventure or settle with what you’ve learned, experienced, and seen thus far?
What I know for sure is this: your soul is ageless. If it has been given an age, then that age has been manufactured by you. It is the only way. Proceed how you’d like. But, over here? I’d rather forget about my age and carry on living with just as much enthusiasm for tomorrow as I had today and yesterday. For, eventually, our trips around the sun will come to an end. And what a shame it would be if we stopped living years before that day came.
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