ARE WE FOOLS WHO MOURN OUR PASSING YOUTH?

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 13, Issue 5, 8 October 1948, Page 7

ARE WE FOOLS WHO MOURN OUR PASSING YOUTH?

(Contributed by the Ministers’ Association) & We are fools to mourn our passing youth. We should congratulate ourselves. It is dime that someone called the bluff of youth and revealed it as the touching, self-conscious, uneasy period that it really is. Of course, there are disadvantages about growing older. This world is, we are told, a vale of tears, and it would be surprising and rather disconcerting if any period were quite perfect. I know that the vast majority of people never grow up at all. All aged and deplorable bores who can think of nothing but themselves are not adult at all. They are victims, not of age but of protracted infancy. They have never learned how to interest themselves in adult occupations. They have grown decrepit before they have grown mature. Desire has failed because they still desire childish things. And they themselves go about the streets mourning the physical buoyancy which was youth’s one gift to them. They are the most tragic people in the world. We cannot help their troubles. It takes us .all our time to live so that when we are seventy we may feel ourselves at last on the right side of sixty-nine. For living is an art for which some are born with more natural talent than others, but which cannot, for any, be matured without long patience. „ ) Youth invariably wastes time in regrets, false starts and egotistic hesitations. But middle age should bring some technical mastery which is a pleasure in itself. The excitements of apprenticeship are as nothing compared with the ecstasies of achievement. The achievement need not be spectacular. We make a grave mistake if we think that the art of life has been mastered only by philosophers, surgeons, statesmen and • the like. There are middle-aged and elderly reformers whose life is one progressive adventure. Nobody might think , it, just to look at them. . . . The 'really important thing is that public work brings a vicarious but assured sense of immortality. Too many women, ' when they reach thirty, have lost their vision. As they have been, so they conclude they will be—middling, ordinary, prosaic. But that is neither brave nor Christian. God sends us all gleams of what can be, and may be yet. I would- not suggest that after thirty life is a continuous progression of felicity till death cuts us short on the threshold of perfection. Until we have learned far more about our physical relation to the universe our joints will stiffen, our arteries harden, our sight grow dim and our powers wane. But there are compensations.