Allow Me to Digress

Just had a chat with my friend Aimee, who’ll be celebrating her nth birthday tomorrow!  With her birthday coming up, I rememer this quote that I really like, one I used to email to friends on their birthdays.  In case you’re feeling old, reading this might help you bring back your youth. 

“Youth is not entirely a time of life – it is a state of mind.  It is not wholly a matter of ripe cheeks, red lips or supply knees.  It is a temper of the will, a quality of the imagination, a vigor of the emotions, a freshness of the deep springs of life.  It means a temperamental predominance of courage over timidity, of an appetite for adventure over love of ease.

Nobody grows old by merely living a number of years.  People grow old only by deserting their ideals.  Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up interest wrinkles the soul. 

Worry, doubt, self-distrust, fear and despair – these are the long, long years that bow the head and turn the growing spirit back to dust.  Whatever your years, there is in every being’s heart the love of wonder, the undaunted challenge of events, the unfailing child-like appetite for what next, and the joy in the game of life. 

You are as young as your faith, as old as your doubt; as young as your self-confidence, as old as your fear; as young as your hope, as old as your despair.

In the central place of every heart there is a recording chamber; so long as it receives messages of beauty, hope, cheer and courage, so long are you young.  When the wires are all down and your heart is covered with the moss of pessimism and the ice of cynicism, then, and then only, are you grown old.” 

-  General Douglas MacArthur during his 75th birthday speech, quoting from Samuel Ullman’s (1840–1924) poem

To Aimee, happy birthday

To Walt, ikaw - forever "Young." Ayan may nadedicate na ako for you

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