I just read a comment by my niece on her Facebook page where she says that she feels like an old person in an 18 yr old’s body. She has obviously spent a lot of time thinking about things that ordinarily only come with more age. As one who has felt the way she describes many times myself, it made me proud of her. I of course am no longer young, but I have always felt different from other people. I have written about this subject before, but let me say again that we have to live our own life. You can’t be anyone but yourself, and you shouldn’t even want too.
Surface beauty is nothing, it is only skin deep. Owning a bigger house or nicer car is nothing, they won’t last, and besides you can only use the space your body occupies at the time. No matter how important we may feel, we don’t really take up very much room in this world.
Why do we so desire to appear to be more than we are to others? Why is it that “just ourself” is never enough? Why can’t we just enjoy each moment, instead of spending hours each day desiring what we don’t need, or imaging how jealous our friends will feel if we can just figure a way to buy that fancy new car, those nice name brand clothes, that swimming pool? Of course with different ages come different desires. A young man will want to date or marry the prettiest and most popular girl, even though her personality may suck. A young girl will of course want only the biggest, strongest, most athletic jock in school, even though he may not have two brain cells to rub together.
I think that if suddenly all the people in the world were to disappear, except for one man and one woman, they wouldn’t care what the other looked like. They would just be glad for companionship and love. It seems nearly impossible to train our mind to always think without jealousy, hate, envy, lust, or desire, but we really need to try. We are now taught by what we see on television, what we read, and in nearly everything we see around us, that more is better. It is not only better, but it is ok to lie, cheat, steal, or even kill to get it. Not too many years ago tv shows usually had moral value. Now nothing is taboo. Everything is ok because we have become so smart that we can explain everything. Child molesters are really the victims because they were mistreated when they were children; murderers are not really mean, they were just trying to rob your home when you caught them. In a world where anything goes, it seems that common sense has flown right out the window. In spite of the fact that we consider ourselves super civilized and knowledgeable, it has all become frightening to me. Where will it stop?
To my niece I say this. “I am glad that you are smarter than the people around you. Fitting in is something that we all desire, but really it brings small rewards. Your life is a gift from God, and you can never bring back a day, or even a moment after it is gone. Live each day being true to yourself and what you know is right. Success is widely touted as possessing more material things, but they who practice that are wrong: success is where someday, when you are about to take your last breath, you can look back and say, ‘even though I made mistakes, they were my mistakes. I made them honestly and I learned from them.’ Life is like a soap opera, that each day presents a new scenario. The scenes run every gamut of emotions. Happy, sad, good, bad, sometimes horrible, but sometimes great. All are part of the school of life. How you react to each is what shows the core of yourself. The time that the shallow ones spend being a fake, is like an actor portraying a part in a movie. It may be entertaining, or even amusing, but its not real, and its time lost.”
