Advice For The Young At Heart

There is infinite amount of wisdom that we can communicate through songs.  To me, they are a misunderstood form of poetry.  Not all of them of course, but you can always identify in the lyrics of a song the right advice, or the right attitude that you may need at the moment. 

Today I am once again fascinated by the simplicity, the wisdom, and the impact of the lyrics of Advice For The Young At Heart, from Tears For Fears: Advice for the Young At Heart, Soon we will be older When we gonna make it work?

Many times in our lives we are considering options and we are making decisions, and we are using the best judgment we have at the time.  At the time, not always.  Some days we feel strong and brave and invincible, while others we feel small and vulnerable and useless and small.  The decision we would make on these two different days, would be equally different.  Our psyche itself cannot always raise us to the expectations of each occasion.  We need to help as well, and we need to overcome the weight of our own years.

A few years ago, I had to make some drastic decisions for the future of my family and for myself.  Being 40 years old didn’t stop me, but it helped me to make mature decisions that would benefit everyone around me.  That mature judgement made me move my family to another country, away from everyone and everything that we had in life, and start over.  We had strength and determination on our side, and we coupled it with a strong sense of responsibility for the young ones that we were raising.  

We faced a multitude of problems and obstacles, but we never had a doubt in our minds that we were operating under good sense, good judgement, and mature thinking.  That helped us move forward, overcome our problems, and stand on our feet, with dignity and optimism for the future.

Life always moves on, without hesitation or delay, without waiting for us to be ready, it just moves forward relentlessly.  We were forced to move forward as well, under the same  dogmatic approach of moving forward.  I changed jobs, Yiota studied and started a new career, we moved house, the children grew up, circumstances changed in our families back home.  Deep down we are still thinking ahead as if the world is still our to own, like we have all the time in the world.  Which is not a bad thing.  There is no point in setting limits to ourselves, on the contrary, it is refreshing to live without an undeserved constraint of what one can do.  

Here is where the lyrical advice comes in.  The simple advice to those that are young or young at heart is that unavoidably they will soon be older.  Time will not wait, and we are going to grow older and older, at least those lucky ones.  Time pass on and unless we embrace our lives and we live our lives to the fullest of our abilities, we will soon be older with less time or less ability.  We may be in a position of regret and compromise, or even running out of options, and eventually running out of time.

An advice to the young would be that they will also become older, just like the people in front of them were once younger.  The circle of life never ends and the things that happened before, will happen again.  Young people, ourselves included, we need to be mindful of our parents’ journey in life, and realise that we are making a similar trip, just a glance behind them.  We all chose the exact road we will travel, and we have the opportunity to avoid mistakes and pitfalls that others before us did.  But we are following the same trajectory, that will make us rigid, opinionated, smelly, wrinkled, slower, weaker, more insecure, and more aware of our own mortality.

Why did this song come into my head today?  Well, job insecurity.   I find myself being highly affected by my age - maybe not just my age - and I realise all the changes and compromises I have started to make in my life.  Also, I find myself trying to resist this change, hopelessly or not.   My body slows down and I cannot run, sprint, jump, or lift as much as I used to.  My basketball teammates might be criticising my abilities, ignoring my history or the amount of effort and determination it takes.  They ignore for the moment that they will soon be older too.  

My mind is slowing down as well, which is unfortunate since I rely on it to make a living.  My memory fades, my ability to learn diminishes, my ability to concentrate is limited to shorter time intervals, and my mental tiredness comes easier than it used to.  Professionally I am competing for my space under the sun, or rather under the digital spectrum of technological change, and I feel the handicap when I am coming across much younger fellas that have nothing to lose or nothing to worry about.  They are probably laughing inside whenever I mention experience or stories from the old days, but they are forgetting I that they will also become yesterday’s news, and soon they will be older.

Finally, my soul is getting slower.  Or is it?  I face the passage of time bravely when I look my children’s eyes, and see the spark, the joy, the energy, the fire inside them.  They are young and how I wish they didn’t get older.  My soul needs to find the words and the actions and the messages, to make them good people.  People that will face life with dignity, respect, courage, strength, love, and happiness.  My soul needs to make them better than I have been, and when eventually they will be older, they will look back and they will have no regrets, they will have no nightmares to haunt them, they will have only rainbows and smiles, only friends and loved ones, only happiness and love.  I guess, I worry about my legacy which is the most definitive sign of getting old.

So back to my soul, it is not only hard to accept our own demise, but also to live through the demise of people we grew up with or we lived with or we have known all our lives.  How can we live through our loved ones passing on, how can we accept that we are following the same track, how can we endure the physical and emotional pain of watching ourselves become something we never thought we would become?  That is the suffering and pain of getting old, and although I am not that old yet, I feel that I have been aware of these emotions all my life.

The song’s advice is not pessimistic that we will old become old and die. No.  The message is that we will all become old, so while you are young keep it in mind.  Be optimistic in your lives and seek the opportunities that life offers you while you are young, not because you won’t find them again, but because they taste different and maybe better when we are young.  Be empathetic to the people that have been young before you, as you will have the same need when you are older.  Be mindful of the people around you as you will need people to care about you later in life.  Be full of love as this is the only thing you can carry with you throughout your whole life, and even beyond that.

Advice.