"The youth have aspirations which never come to pass, the old have reminisces of what never happened." - Saki (1870-1916). "Reginald at the Carlton," Reginald, 1904

The youth is what we are before, and the aged is what we are after. To be young is to be full of vim and vigor, to be raring off into the sunset at the last chance, and to be as unsure of where we are going as we are of where we are right now. A youth is someone who has not yet done what they set out to do. On the contrary, the old have spent their vim and vigor in pursuit of building a life, love to sit and stare at the sunset during the evening, and know quite well where they are, and where they are shortly going to be. An aged person is someone who has done something, and hope that it is what they set out to do. To be old and young are relative states, for one can be both old and young at the same time - we must only be old and young in different ways. When I speak with someone, they are both older and wiser than me, and at the same time younger and more foolish. It is the circumstances we are placed in, the goals to which we reach, that reveal the differences between our two ages. Man can grow in any direction, and the plan of that life is not to be directed very well by the best of our strengths and intentions - we can only determine the strength and distance to which we reach. 

This strength and distance are not definite areas set out in stone, but are instead a thing which shifts and waves in our sight. To a great extent, we are what we think we are; the youth is able to try and do things, to engage in actions, and to achieve goals which are just a little short of his ideals, because he thinks that he can catch up to his ideals, to his perfect world. Oh, perhaps we don't think this with our heads, but we do with our hearts. Before we have succeeded or failed, before we have lived our attempt, there is, in the back of our heads and, silently shrinking in fear, the idea that, perhaps, we will win this time. Maybe all our dreams will come true, and the future will be what we believed it could be. As we grow older, this solvent voice turns from a voice of hope which drives us outward, into a voice of hope which builds us up by going inward. Our past is almost never exactly what we remember it as, and we are always re-interpreting our lives, for a moment in our past is like a poem in our present - there Is always more to learn. 

Today I read a poem by A. E. Houseman, XIX in More Poems - This is a poem which kI have read before, a poem which I remembered reading as soon as I had laid by eyes upon it, but also a poem which I could not have recited from memory before I had read it today. I have read the poem before, and it has meaning to me, so I am old by definition. Before I read the poem I was ignorant, I knew not what I would find when I read the book, and I hoped that reading it would help me deal with feelings, hoped that it would assuage some sadness of mine. I read the poem, and it did not - it only turned the sadness into understanding. Now I am old, and I think back upon the poem, so that the meaning of the poem seems to me to be universal, to be a poem written by a man dad a hundred years, and yet oh so close to my soul today, tio the words I would have spoken had I but the power and skill to do so. One day I shall forget the poem again, and grow young, opening the book again to hope to find some succor from the hurts of the world, thus growing old again. So too is it with life - as I remember the past, it is transformed into something which never really was, into words which were not written for or aimed at me, or things I did which were not exactly failures, and not exactly successes, though I may call them such. Yet the day will come when I forget my failures again, and reach out, thinking that this time I can do better. I might not be perfect, but I can do better

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