The rest of my life = NOW

You know the feeling you get when you sit in a swing and get it going and you go higher and higher until you feel like the whole thing is going to fall apart? Very liberating but also restricting. You can't go as high as you could when you were a kid. You'll think you might break the swing, or worse, your own bones! As a kid if the structure moved a little you didn't care, it was fun! (Ok I admit, it still is, but now you'd have to pay for it yourself if you break it). You realize you're an adult.

Society says we are adults at the age of 18 (In most of Europe anyway, I think the US is closer to the truth with the age 21..) We can buy alcohol and cigarettes, and we can drive a car legally once we obtain a license. When we turn 18, we become responsible for ourselves. We have to pay our own bills, we usually move out of the family home to live on our own in a little rental apartment (Freedom woohoo!) and we might even buy that old Corolla -88. All this is well and good, but do you really feel like an adult? 

I was walking my dog this morning and got to wondering how all those adult people get married and have kids and buy houses and get lease cars etc... Then I realized, a lot of my old friends who are my age, are doing exactly that. Some of their children are already 3 years old! That means that while I was busy partying and travelling around Europe, they were pregnant and getting ready for "the rest of their lives". I don't know how I want the rest of my life to look like. Do they know? Do you? 

I believe the phrase "settle down" used to mean that you find a partner, get married, buy a house, have children and maybe get a golden retriever or a shitzu. But nowadays it's not like that. Even if you get married it doesn't mean that you will spend the rest of your life in the same town, doing exactly the same things over and over and over again. It doesn't even mean that you will spend the rest of your life in the same country! Why couldn't you still have the exciting, travelling, full of adventures kind of life you always wanted, but just do it with someone? Why couldn't you open up your own business or take up a new career, even if you are all "settled down"?

And why do we even differentiate between now and the rest of our lives? I like to think I'm already living the rest of my life. This is it: an ever changing, moving, exhilarating, happy, variable constant. I hope that the feeling of being young never leaves me. True, the body will change and it wont be able to do all the things I might want to do, but I will keep trying for as long as I can bat my eyes.  

Think it will break? -Naaah...

At some point in my life I will probably want to "settle down", but I'd like to think I'll be the silly old fool who'll still be riding horses at the age of 80 (if I'm still alive, that is) while onlookers fear for my old prostate hips. I want to be the crazy granny who goes to the kiddy park just to sit on the swing to go higher and higher and higher.... hopefully with that someone special right beside me going just as high on his swing.

-S-