As a toddler, every day is about experiencing and learning new things. Never prejudging, children walk into new things with an innocence and a joy. Through their school years they begin to understand that there are things they like and things they don’t. In searching for their individuality, they become stronger in their convictions of what they don’t care for often seeking an easier path for each of their new days.
Then we finish school and off to work and striving to establish ourselves. The fear that was missing as a toddler now manifests itself as a story teller. Our fears of the unknown begin to dominate our lives. We anxiously want to experience new things but strangely begin to allow our fears of the unknown from granting us the opportunity to grow and evolve. It takes away the basic understanding that to grow we need to be placed somewhere new. To learn or experience new things. Just like a toddler.
Things then become more strange as we enter middle age. Our appearance begins to change. Our birthdays become unreal days when we think about how old we truly are. And we begin to think about an easier life when we are able to retire. That we have learned enough, worked enough, played enough, and have seen enough to know everything that we want to. So our lives become trapped in routine and dullness. What can be seen as new is simply passed by as if we are in a car driving on a highway.
To be young is such an exciting time in our lives. Its limitation is that we are not in a position to understand this when we are young. As we age, we have the depth of life’s experience to understand that there is so much to learn and experience combined with our knowledge of how to make it through each day without harm.
New things can infuse each of our days with the exuberance of a child. Regardless of age. Regardless of circumstance. As we get older, we have more skills to go deeper into new things that can appear in our life. We need to find them, keep looking for them, and immerse ourselves in them to refresh us and pull us away from our routine into the excitement that life can bring to us when things are new.
You’re never too old to start. You’re never too young to start. While there are no fountains of youth on earth, exploring, trying, experiencing, and learning new things can keep us young, fresh, and alive in spirit, thought, and energy as we continue to age as we live each day of our lives.