Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall...What the @#$% Happened?

Aging. It's inevitable and will always happen. Unless you are a vampire. But the word aging...

Can it mean mentally or physically? Because mentally, I might be very old but physically I am very young. Or perhaps my body is old, wrinkled and dried up and yet I still play with Legos and have trouble in math.

Aging is an odd thing. So is the circle of life, and our different thoughts at different ages.

As a young child, we never want to grow up. In the words of Peter Pan: "I don't ever want to be a man. Yuck! I always want to be a little boy and to have fun."

As a teenager, we spend our entire angst-filled lives thinking, "Can't wait to be fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen!"

Once we are legally an adult, at eighteen, we do one of two things. We rejoice at finally being able to do certain things. Driving, voting, buying cigarettes. All the fun stuff that as teenagers we couldn't wait to do. Parties are thrown, drugs are experimented and sadly, occassionally lives are lost due to the reckless behavior of people just barely out of their teenage years.

Or...we miss our childhood greatly. Sure, we may engage in the parties and we'll drive our cars and sometimes smoke a cigarette or two. But we'll miss the fun-filled innocent days of Legos, milk and cookies, and nap time. (Ahh...nap time.)

Once we reach our late-twenties or early-to-late-thirties, we realize just how serious life is. We start to become tired, more serious. We don't go to parties as often, we don't have nearly as much fun. Cars are no longer for showing off and being "cool." Now, they are means of transportation, driving from home to work, from work to the store, from the store to picking up your children from school, back to home.

The next stage, in the thirties, forties, fifties, is when we start uttering this phrase: Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall...What the @#$% happened?

Once we reach fifties, sixties, seventies, it is time to retire and relax. We become softer, more relaxed and sometimes happier.

And by the time death comes, we have accepted it. Our lives, while they may not have been entirely pleasant, have been well lived and loved.

Enjoy your life, my aging friends.