Youth should be a wonderful time of life. It is something like the spring season of the year. Youth is a time of fresh vitality. Your body is getting stronger and your mind is also developing. Many opportunities are opening up to learn and to do things. So there are lots of reasons why youth should be a happy and exciting time.
But is it, or will it be, for you? There are many things that can help or hinder in this. Some of these are things you can’t do anything about.
Right now you are in a transition time, a period of change. Your body, for example, is moving toward physical maturity. But it doesn’t reach that stage until sometime between the ages of twenty and twenty-three. It can take still longer for you to reach emotional maturity. Some of the changes taking place in you could make you feel confused or unsure of yourself. When you feel new pressures building up inside, how do you handle them?
You can even enjoy meeting the challenges they bring, for they are all part of the remarkable experience of becoming an individual, a distinct person—You.
Sometimes it may seem that your life is very restricted, filled with “do’s” and “don’ts.” But, thinking of it another way, when you’re young you have a kind of freedom you won’t have later on. Instead of being loaded down with all the responsibilities that older people have, you’re free to spend a lot of time getting knowledge and developing your abilities and skills. You have much more time to learn about and to think about what other people have done or are doing. You can learn about their successes and their failures, and can see where they made wise choices or foolish mistakes. This can help you to know what direction you want to take on the road of life.
It’s a simple fact of life that every one of us builds on what others before us learned. But you can’t do that without communication. With no communication—no talking, no reading, no observing of others so as to learn—there is no drawing on the knowledge and experience that others have gained.
To get the best out of your youth you need to benefit from what others have learned. This includes such things as how to take the best care of your body, how to get and to keep really good friends, helpful guidelines as to dating and courting, and the answers to questions about marriage, sex and the use of alcoholic drinks or drugs.
But maybe you are thinking about what you see today in the world around you. There is a lot of selfishness. Many people are being treated unfairly. There is also much cheating, pollution, crime, war, lying and hypocrisy. ‘So what can I learn from older persons when they have made such a mess of things?’ you may ask.
True, many older persons today do bear guilt for these conditions. They either take part in the wrongs done or at least go along with and support the systems that produce those conditions.