A credit card with a parking spot

Chapter 203

Maya Angelou wrote: “I am convinced that most people do not grow up. We find parking spaces and honor our credit cards. We marry and dare to have children and call that growing up. I think what we do is mostly grow old. We carry accumulation of years in our bodies and on our faces, but generally our real selves, the children inside, are still innocent and shy as magnolias.”

What we do is mostly grow old. That needs to stop, and regardless of our biological years floating around the sun, our spirits and outlooks need to stay young and energetic. Don’t just accumulate years on your face and in your mind, stay vibrantly hopeful and youth fully  optimistic inside. While you may not be able to control how the one happens to you, you can certainly give the second one freedom to romp inside your heart and mind.

We do not want our lives to be defined as people who find parking places and use credit cards. But that has such a ring of truth to it, that it is unignorable. The sum of our days is far too often that mundane and uninspiring, that small. Don’t get offended, get moving. Change direction. Make a difference. Choose more. Be more!

You have been able to produce offspring since you were 14 years or so, and that is a purely biological function, and is no claim to maturity and adulthood. You can legally marry in many places by the time you are 16 years old and so neither is that a claim to maturity and adulthood. Look at the divorces and separations and children abandoned into foster care - proving that many of such decisions are made in poor judgement, and without the character and maturity to follow through and make good on them.

Be more!