The best years of my life...

Interesting enough that while thinking about what this day meant to me, I started pondering about the best years of my life.

 

While growing up, we have often been told by our "elders" to cherish our youth and the good times that come with it. Why is this? According to our elders, who experienced those good times long ago, your youth brings the best years of your life.

 

When we consider the common advice from our elders, the emphasis on what makes these years great is the fact that we are young. The trouble with this viewpoint is that, somehow, it is our young age, which glamorizes these years more so than those of our elders; somehow, life experiences lose their value once we exit these golden years. Personally, the older I get, the more my life experiences mean to me.

 

I have always stayed hopeful for the future, and it has allowed me to push myself harder to reach my ultimate goal. While in secondary school, I did a great deal of Rugby and had a bunch of great ruggers that used party and live up life the way we thought it should be. Mind you, these "kids" were relatively well off and had used money in ways that would shame a working adult. I used to think that those were the best years of my life.

 

Then I went overseas to college and it opened up a whole new spectrum of what life was. Fraternity parties, football buddies, cars, women, sex, drugs...you name it, the whole nine yards. I remembered screaming on countless occasions just how great life was. Sure, college had its pitfalls, and it wasn’t one big party all the time, but it was certainly a time in my life when I started defining the person

 

After which I returned home, served the nation, met my beautiful wife and decided to settle down. During our wedding, I remembered feeling like I was the most fortunate man in this world, blessed with a happy family on both sides. These days, I look forward to coming home from work to the warm embrace of my kids! The usual Friday evening bath-time, weekend movies, xbox and family holidays now defines my version of true happiness!

 

Yet I see many around me worry about what the future holds. As we turn 40, it is inevitable to start feeling that we are slowly creeping into mid life crisis. But maybe, just maybe, the years that come after our glamorous youth winds down can be just as amazing. How, you ask? We need to remove defeatist words, like “were” and “used to be” from our vocabularies. Instead, we need to stay hopeful and keep an open mind to new experiences, even as we grow older and life becomes routine.

 

Instead of focusing on why our past years were the best years of our lives, why don’t we focus on how we can live the rest of our lives to the fullest, making each year better than the last. We need to stop anticipating the coming years with animosity and just simply embrace them with positivity.

 

None of us truly know what will happen as we progress through life, so why should we already have a prejudice towards something that hasn’t even happened yet?

 

It’s human nature to fear the unknown and to hold onto the familiar, but at one time, didn’t all new things seem a little scary? Don’t hold onto the familiarity of your youth and miss out on the rest of your life because you are scared of what comes next. We can’t stop the progression of time, but we can control how we react to it.  We need to stop looking at life as a downward regression.

 

Life should be looked at as an upward progression. Each experience we have and each memory we make should build onto the other and continue to make you into a better person, like building blocks. A person shouldn’t feel less than those around them because they aren’t the perfect image of youth anymore. Life is an evolution, and we need to start embracing it, not hiding from it.

So Happy Birthday Old Chap and here's to living through the best years of your life!