what we had

“Youth is wasted on the young.”     -every person between ages 25-100 when around teenagers

But I guess it wouldn’t really work if they were aware of it, now would it. It’s really more like, “Great skin, hair, metabolism, and flexibility are wasted on the youthfully oblivious. That’s what we really mean. But we’ve all got something about ourselves that we still manage to be oblivious of. Even after a lifetime of self-obsessing and nitpicking. Most every woman knows her flaws inside and out. Categorized, prioritized and listed. Yet, if you watch people, there is always something beautiful about them that they probably don’t consider. Something good that isn’t on their own much-shorter good list.

Is it the je ne sais quoi? The little movements… the way your nose moves when you laugh, the cutest knees i’ve ever seen, a perfect hairline at the nape, gentleness, grace. I could just be super detail oriented, but i like to think that those are the things that somebody falls in love with when they fall in love with you. The obvious stuff aside. These bits are heavy hitters we totally write off. When your guy tells you how sexy you are, and your reactive thought is “can’t he see my blemishes??” then you know we’ve been programmed too long to disbelieve. We’re so relentlessly, appallingly hard on our now selves.

As we gaze enviously at teenaged bikini bodies, sighing with regret that we didn’t fully appreciate it more when we had it. We should make a hearty attempt to consider what we will think of longingly about our now selves when we’re 82. Thinking then, “ah, middle age is wasted on the middle aged.” Are we wasting our 30s and 40s wishing we still had what we had in our teens and 20s. Probably. Us middle-agers would like to shake the teens and tell them how good they’ve got it. Maybe the AARPettes would love to do the same to us. Let’s not let them down. After all, we’re not teenagers anymore.

Photo: Kristian Schuller’s eBook 90 Days One Dream