This I Believe
There is nothing more spectacular than being woken up by little whispers as my eight-year-old brother comes into my room at seven in the morning on Christmas day. My brother Ben would peak his head in my door and as it lightly creaked open I would wake up. The fun though was playing dead. He would creep up to me trying to be quiet incase I grumpy for some reason then he slowly tries to see if I am awake. He would peak his head over the covers and looks at my eyes and then slowly turns, head hung low in defeat, knowing that, if it were up to me, Christmas morning wouldn’t start till Christmas afternoon. Then as he is about to reach the door I would move slightly so that his attention is back on me for only a moment, the AHHHHHH. This is my favorite part; he jumps a foot off the ground, lets out a great big cry of fright, then runs over and jumps on me to get me back. I believe that the key to getting older is to hold onto your youth.
I have not lost this youth of mine but I have decided to look at it through the lenses that I have picked up along the way. To be able to look at the world in such a way that I am not always wondering yet still curious is amazing. Eventually everyone grows up but learning to smile can make the process so much fun; even more fun than opening a bunch of neatly rapped boxes on a shiny snow-covered morning. I remember all those times when I was in a position to met new people and my first instinct is not to impress their brains with my head knowledge but to try to meet them on a basic level. I have found that it is the childish, fun loving side of me that catches peoples eyes when I first meet them, not the boring smart guy, “look I can quote the dictionary”, attitude. It certainly helps having a live example to help me maintain that level of innocents but now that I am a big boy in college, not faced with Ben’s hundreds of questions each day and his level of energy that could rival a jet engine. I still find that the idea of holding onto my youth is something worth striving for and so I shall. As someone once said we do not stop smiling because we grow old, we grow old because we stop smiling. So I plan on living my life to the fullest and I will not let growing old keep me from staying young.