We’re gettin’ old

There is also the possibility that we are just plain gettin’ old. Our tastes are changing and our priorities are as well. Lately, we are more pleased by spending a nice little Saturday doing errands and poking around furniture stores, or maybe venturing out to the country for a wine tasting. Our “crazy nights” are fewer and farther between. We’re doing the 9-to-5 and balancing an ever-increasing list of responsibilities with limited free time. Suddenly, “money (really) doesn’t grow on trees” and yes “men are like cable cars” and it’s true that those “early to bed” are “early to rise.” Damn it. They were right.

This doesn’t mean life is suddenly going to get boring. We are young, curious and energized. With the mounting pressure on our generation, we may need to stop and remind ourselves, more often than our parents did, that this is one of the only times in our lives where we can be completely and utterly selfish. We should travel and explore and take chances. We are lucky that society is much more accepting of the idea of “taking your 20s” to understand more about yourself. Yes, your parents may tell you that you’re crazy when you book a two-week, backpacking trip to a Central American jungle, or when you call to say you quit your stable, corporate job to work at a small start-up, but even through the sighs and questions full of worry, they know we will find our way – just as they once did.

If imitation is the highest form of flattery, I suppose our parents would be pleased to hear that they’ve crept into our personality no matter how hard we tried to keep them out. Like it or not, they do have just a few years of life experience on us and now we are in the process of finding out how they became the experts on everything. We’d probably be doing ourselves a service by listening to them every now and then. Pretty soon we’ll have some life tips of our own to pass on to our future kids and the knowledge will continue to accumulate through generations…or go “in one ear and out the other.”

So no, sitting too close to the TV hasn’t made me go blind and I haven’t poked my eye out with that sharp thing yet, but all in all we shouldn’t reject the parts of us that are our parents, we should embrace them. For long after they are gone, we will cherish these little pieces of them that live on in us.

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