This post was started on time, but finished late, it should have come out about three weeks ago.
If you are my age, then you were a teenager in the year 2000.
Which makes this past decade the most monumental decade of your life, so far.
It has been a decade of newfound happiness, first heartbreaks, devirgination, first close friends, introduction to alcohol, introduction to drugs, introduction to real depression, introduction to real joy, broken promises, understanding of the worth of a dollar, development of family ethos, amazing epiphanies, and life-shaping incidents. If I missed a few, which I am sure I have, fill in the blanks. If I mentioned some that don’t apply to you, mark over them. The point has been made.
And so, we can all remember this decade as the one in which we became who we are today. Until the day we die, most of our stories involving our growing pains will chronologically fall into this decade, from which we will pick and choose incidents that best describe us.
But now the decade is over, and it seems a piece of us has to be put away into a cupboard or a file in a mind cabinet. It has to be labeled ‘past’ and forgiven (though not forgotten). And if this past decade is the best and worst through which we have ever breathed, then to what can we look forward?
Let me tell you.
This next decade is the last one in which we get to make big leaps. The cosmetics and labels will be a bit different, but this decade holds in it just as much epic nature as the last. This time around, we get to really fall in love for a long time, start the career which might one day kill us, leave the towns and cities in which we’d stretched our bones and become men and women, marry those partners we find time-worthy, progress our species by reproducing, and buy permanent dwelling places. This is it.
It is in this decade that we can finally dictate the course of our lives.
It is in this decade that we can finally dictate the course of our lives.
Do not lament that the past decade is passed, but sing in joy that now you are in the next.
cave fatuos! 