Forever twenty

My friend Willie came to visit over the weekend. He is my longest standing friendship - almost 28 years. We went to college together when he was 32 and I was 21. That was a dozen lifetimes ago. Willie is 60 now. Of course I am still in my twenties.....

It struck me as he left today that when you are twenty, you think you will be twenty forever, like the line up of days and months and years will continue indefinitely and you'll always get the chance to do them over if you make a mistake or decide you want to take another path.

And then you wake up one day, and you aren't twenty anymore, and you make adjustments to your expectations of life, and you re-evaluate just how old "old" is, and you decide that you'll be thirty forever instead of twenty forever. And then you turn around and it is forty that you are making "forever". And the longer you live, the older "old" is.

I was out at the park yesterday, watching some hippies hanging around doing nothing, much like hippies have always done, only they were modern day hippies, in their twenties. I wanted to walk over to them and hang out, and I almost did. I knew I could relate and connect with them. Then I thought of looking in the mirror, and realized that I wasn't twenty, and that all they would see was an old guy with kids and a balding head. They wouldn't see me - they would see the shell of me that has gotten older and hopefully a little wiser. They wouldn't be able to see that I was still twenty inside.

When I step back and look at my life, I see that I traded being "forever twenty" for finally growing up, but it took me twice twenty to get there. I just wish sometimes that I could have both - "twenty" and "wisdom".