“Youth is the period in which a man can be hopeless.  The end of every episode is the end of the world.  But the power of hoping through everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration comes to the middle-aged.”

– G.K. Chesterton

“Ah, youth,” my mother used to say, “it’s wasted on the young.”

Have I mentioned lately that I am raising a teenager?  My last teenager?  I would say that I have guided five other teens through their metamorphosis into adulthood, but the truth is that I was probably more an observer than a guide.  To think that one can somehow map a course and expect that a teen will follow it is probably just a bit delusional, especially if one comes from a family of hard-headed, single-minded folks like me.

I try to remember my first love, my first breakup, the first time a friendship faltered, my first deep loss, my first overwhelming joy.  I remember them all, but the perspective of time has dimmed the luster a bit and left me wondering whether these things ever really happened at all.

I watch my teenager as she practices to be an adult.  Maybe it’s the allure of freedom — the fear of failure — of becoming her own person who chooses her own destiny that plays the exciting background music that swells with each new event of her life that makes each day an epic drama cast with heroes and villains, good and evil, black and white, right and wrong.  There are no shades of gray in the drama of teenage life.

Here I sit, well into middle-age, and I remember my first love, and my second and third ones.  I remember the friends who have come and gone and sometimes returned again.  I remember the many overflowing days of joy and I number the losses and the griefs and the sadnesses that have come my way.  My black and white has turned to charcoal and ecru and many shades in between.  I guess gray is the color of perspective.  What is painted in those shades of gray is the story of my life so far; and in the midst of it all, in living color, I am still standing.  No longer does each joy seem the best that things could ever be — now I revel in the assurance that when this moment of joy passes, there will be another.  When grief comes, even as I feel it, I know that it will fade with time and that the end of the world is not at hand.

I am not sure when I stopped practicing to be an adult and finally arrived at that state.  I only know that without the drama, without the trials, without the extremes of my young, learning years, I would not have learned that when the dust settled, I would still be standing — perhaps a bit taller than I did at the outset.  I have learned that even when the world seems to be crumbling, my grown-up soul has the wisdom to stand tall, knowing that it will go on.

Ah, youth!  It’s wasted on the young; but there is nothing like the perspective of having lived beyond it.