Youth can do funny things with perception.
If you can’t beat them, join them. I witness this full of youth mindset quite frequently in my years to observe as a teacher.
Before one arrives to actually believe, if ever, the powerful mindset is actually, If you can’t lead them, leave them, there can be no teaching of such arrival to those just not ready to understand.
Reminiscing back to your once younger self, you can accept that even you weren’t close to fully comprehending how you see truth now.
All you can do is watch and observe. Due to their still untraveled journeys, that is all you can do at times, one warped perception to witness after another.
In yet another forefront of growth and development, there is this false pretense of time- as if, like air, there is plenty of it.
In fairness, we were there, too. Some of us, lost due to our innocence. Some of us, just lost in time.
While time is everywhere, for each, only one humanly cycles through.
Time does not return. One o’clock in the afternoon yesterday is not the same one o’clock today. In fact, no one o’clock to have existed are the same.
Another day, another dissected moment, suggests not the same offer. And, yet, in our youth, we can repeat and repeat again the monotony, stimulated whenever some disturbance of routine takes place.
One o’clock yesterday very well, could have generally been the same as the one o’clock today.
Aside from the craziness of hormones where there can be right side up or upside down frowns, both of which tell you nothing, in many cases, of what one is truly feeling and may very soon exhibit itself in an instant, I watch and take note as I look within the hallways of students passing by between periods.
It’s like those walking through the busy streets of Times Square in Manhattan. You see the tourists and those taking moments to chat while there are the others, moving about, directive in their footsteps.
Routine. School creating habits of the heart, mind, body, and spirit. You live through this part, a lot of strength in character build-up will continue beyond.
Handle this part ineffectively, life after school will only be the starting point of what you should have already known. For some, just a little too late to substantiate good habits for the rest of life to face.
Set ways, whatever that may be, is essentially the routine that becomes.
Even something as doing nothing productive, progressive, or professional is a routine.
One can routinely work towards progress or perpetual fails. Still, both have a habituated pattern.
The schedule of in and out. “Locked in” (a teacher learns this to mean, “focused”) to each class lesson only to step out to check in once again within passing periods whatever may be a worthwhile distraction until end of day dismissal.
We think to own time if not, have plenty of it, where we can mooch off its given splendor. And, so, we waste so much of it until all of a sudden, you look at your road of life and realize you stand on the other side now, toward the second portion of the road still untraveled.
One can hope for all to feel gratitude to have arrived from what was finished or left behind.
To arrive at a destiny leads one to ask, however, How much more different is this from before? If you’ve arrived, is where you stand a place you smile with great contentment?
Should you fear of having gone too far ahead or should you instead fear that where you are today is not far from where you were yesterday?
There is instinctive fear and then, there is the taught fear to become or to venture. Yes?
Has the latter controlled your destiny and not you? Do you accept this to be the fear that has held you back?
Did you see yourself to become so many ways, so many possibilities, so versatile in options of the final phase of your masterpiece self?
While time keeps going, we ceaselessly run into the exposure of examples and non-examples. Eventually, we hope that each of us shall clearly know the difference between the two.
Without clarity at times or merely the need for validation, we barter with what we convince ourselves others want to see, afraid to admit of what is aching within that others should actually be seeing instead.
Knock-offs are not genuine.
Do you not know of which you present to be most valuable and still, you counter your knowing, fearing rejection of what you truly have to give?
As time goes, are we thinking there will always be time to run back to find our true self again, hidden in a corridor, perhaps back when still an aspiring child?
Would our true self remain to still exist?
To my unknown fortune, I seemed to have always been running from those thoughts, those whispers to catch up with me.
Whether I was running from or running toward something, I can look back and recall that I was moving. If not my body, my heart, my mind or, my spirit.
Was I running from other’s failures, in fear I would become one?
Was I running toward my hopes and aspirations, in fear to be already too late?
Either way, perhaps examples and non-examples around me served as reminders that time keeps going with or without you.
Finishing one thing only provided the opportunity to seek the next thing to do, perhaps afraid to run out of purpose to keep moving forth.
While I could not stop time, I began to realize early that there can be so much done within a time given.
Yes?
The challenge with this is that the world is not synchronized with your inner thoughts. The world not only goes at a different pace or direction but also, may not share your same inner belief.
Not everyone can take you seriously if you are youth ahead of time.
While you try to get the world to work with you, the opposition have it rather to challenge you, simultaneously throwing straight and curve balls from all angles.
While no one should play victim to blame anyone or anything for their own pitfalls, time just doesn’t tell you how to best spend every moment of it.
You must ultimately decide to try anyway.
After all, you have nothing to lose but time itself.
I held my first child, our oldest boy, just three days old, on my nineteenth birthday.
I couldn’t have been any prouder and overjoyed.
One could look at me back then with pity of having lost time in my youth while others may very well have looked at me thinking how much time I saved ahead of me.
I chose the mindset of the latter.
I had three beautiful, healthy children by the age of twenty-five.
By then, I had a BA and endorsement in Psychology along with a K-8 Teacher’s Certificate.
How much time had I really lost?
Had I lost time at all?
Had I not gained and saved so much time instead?
So, how can I judge the young minds of today?
As I look at the interactions of youth, all I can do is observe and watch.
Who would have thought I, having been just like them, would see herself fulfilled in time?
My golden years, the best times still to conquer and yet, I have already lived quite a journey.
When I’m on my deathbed I will want to say, “I could have done more.” –Shark Tank, Robert Herjavec
I would probably just add, with one last smile, “But, gosh darn it! I sure did a lot!”
