How to Stay Young Forever

I got out of work early today and let out a thorny sigh, dreaming of the days of carefree childhood. Days were longer then, I swear it, when I was so small they reached out like long shadows of Koa trees over my sunburned knees. The sun would wake me with a loving pinch on my cheek, and the moon would wink upon my pillowcase at night. I would run with the crickets in the jasmine-elixir of shaping poetry as the inspiration danced with my free yellow hair. And, like Naomi Shihab-Nye reflects in Growing, I felt that stabbing realization that memories build up in cloudy blankets like dreams - slipping away with wakefulness. That loss of youth stings you when you turn 10 years old.

Double digits have so many consequences. I remember wishing, when I was 9, that I was 16 and able to drive a blue sports car across the ocean to great big "mainland." Sixteen tapped my back before I was ready to claim it, wagging it's finger, saying, 'watch what you wish for." Why is it that we can't wait to grow up when the world seems to be endless, yet as soon as we cut the red tape into "adult" life, we become filled with regret for all those carefree moments - those that eclipsed into dreams too quickly? Naomi Shihab-Nye remarks on these and other things in her collection, Never In a Hurry. She illustrates with ease the blatant beauty of life that winks at our distracted faces every day.

There are so many dazzling, yet simple awarenesses, that Shihab-Nye exudes, and at times I feel compelled to plaster them all over my walls to serve as a constant reminder that life is a gift, that low moments need not be filled with monsters of expectation. Sometimes I find that my tendency to overanalyze existence wears me down, and I find myself, like today, wishing I had something productive to do. But isn't that the trouble with Americans?

Hadn't Americans become to destination oriented, hurtling forth toward places when we barely had enough time to get there, driving fast all the way? (Shihab-Nye)

I often feel so stifled by my "service" job. The push for productivity, the look busy ethic even if it means stifling that fleeting line of prose in those brief moments of stillness. As my employer told me "You can never do enough cleaning," but haven't we sanitized everything to the point of cookie-cutter boredom? Yet we all have to find a way to get by, to make due. I've cut my red tape and still find myself looking back.

But in reading Shihab-Nye's work, I find time to breathe again. The delicacies of everyday become illuminated through her eyes, her words, and inspire me to pause for a moment and look up at the tall American trees guarding me. There is a reminder everywhere that nature has held on to the balance we have long ago forsaken in our reach for progress. The wind is a passage of experience: every gust a memorandum that we can choose to absorb every moment, or let it pass by, unnoticed.

Even strangers can show us that life is here to grasp by the horns. A woman passing by with her head down, a man on the corner begging for some change; these are images of freedom - in the ownership in nothing but expression and experience that we all have in common. All of us have moments of great highs, and devastating lows, but as Shihab-Nye reminds us we need to revel in every moment of it: "Have a lot of fun in your lives, people just don't have enough fun."

Sometimes it is hard to remember that life is short, and one must move slowly. What we lose in our haste drops out of reach and shatters into irreparable pieces like toppled glass figurines - lost forever in muddy footprints of our vanished childhood. This is the challenge, and they key, to life: live for every moment, love what you do, and find what you love. You will wake up tomorrow and it will be another day to learn, to love, to live. What more could you ask for?