Staying Young At Heart

You know how old people often complain about “things these days, and how it was much better, or much tougher, or much poorer, or whatever ‘back in my day’ “? Well I caught myself doing that with Dave on the phone, as I was lamenting the large cost that Tyler paid for his prom expenses (tux+prom tickets+corsage+limo>$200), and talking about how screwed up things are today that kids pay that kind of money, when they can have just as good a time like I did if they just wear their normal suit and drive their own car to the prom.

And then all of a sudden it hit me like a ton of bricks: What causes people to age mentally and make themselves irrelevant to the next generation is negative judgment of the present, based on comparing the present to the past! Oh My God. This is big folks… When we humans get to about 40 or 45 years old, we often start comparing what is happening now or what our kids are doing to how things were when we were younger, or what we did as kids or young adults. It is just natural for humans to do that. And it kills us! It kills us because it drives us into a negative judgmental assessment of the present, and distances us from our kids and from other people who are living quite happily in the present. We end up living the past, by virtue of our constant comparisons to the past.

So I am declaring, right here and right now, in front of all of you, that I am not going to do that. I am going to avoid comparing and judging now with the past. Talking about the past and sharing facts about the past is useful and interesting, so I will keep doing that. But I will NOT be declaring the present to be somehow inferior or screwed up because of my past experience. And as a result, I will stay young at heart forever. And I am going to share this insight with many people, because I believe everyone who is 45 years or older has a major tendency to do this, so if I can stop people from doing it, then many others will stay young at heart forever as well.

And here is what I will be doing instead of judging now based on then… I shall celebrate the new way that things are done now. And I shall celebrate the joy that I see in people living life the way it is lived now. Celebrate how cell phones ring everyone now because that is people being connected and in touch in ways that were never possible before. Celebrate $200 proms because the kids are having fun, and the $200 includes a save limo ride so that the kids don’t kill themselves driving home from the prom like they used to. Celebrate video games because of the joy they bring to the people that play them and because they have led to hand-eye coordination in the next generation that is unprecedented. You get the idea.

I cannot believe that all of a sudden, out of the blue, I realized the secret to staying young at heart. And it is something that each of us can easily and ongoingly do. Because all that is needed is self-monitoring and to shift out of past-based judgment whenever we detect we are doing it.