To be grown up is a state of mind

My daughter Vrutti won the 1st prize for this at school…
Let’s begin by asking ourselves the question “What does growing up mean to me?”. I am very sure that the answer would differ vastly from person to person present here. For some, growing up may mean ageing, for some it may mean moving from school to college, for some it may mean running a household like their parents do, and yet for some others, it may mean getting more mature than they are now. Each one of us has a different perception of growing up in the future, and nobody seems to be right or wrong.
Now let’s look at the other side of the same question. Often, when talking among friends we say “I want to be a small child again.” Why do we say this? It’s because we miss the carefree and fun filled life we enjoyed when we were toddlers. Probably twenty years from now, we would wish we got back our school life that we have today.
This behavior, we as humans, exhibit is because we always relate the term “growing up” to past or potential future events in our life, most of the times closely connected to the age factor. But most other animals don’t exhibit this behavior as much as humans. For example, no matter how old a tiger is, he will always try to hunt for food as long as he is alive. As soon as he stops hunting, he is bound to die of hunger and disease.
All the time, we hear about “growing up” from our parents, teachers and friends, then start relating it to certain age groups. We have assumed that 20-35 years is the range for young age, or when someone reaches 60 years he/ she is supposed to be considered as an old aged person. While it is true that physical strength of a person gradually diminishes, does this necessarily mean we give up on living a happy and energetic life after a certain age? Shouldn’t that ideally be a time to live life for ourselves, and instead of worrying about age, shouldn’t we pursue our interests and hobbies which we might have left behind until now?
Recently, on a social media site I read the story of Colonel Harland Sanders. The name might not be familiar to many but his brand is familiar to people all around the world. Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) was founded by Colonel Sanders after the age of 65! At that old age he desperately tried to sell his recipe to restaurants and got around 1000 rejections before he managed to become successful.
A personal example for me is my own grandfather. He has been a computer software developer since the 1970’s and used to work on some of the older programming technologies like Clipper and dBASE in the MS-DOS environment. Due to constant workload and financial pressure, he did not get a chance to upgrade his technical skills as new technologies evolved. Today, at the age of 74, since he had some free time, he started actively learning advanced excel & VBA programming, and is working on replicating the functionality of his old programs in Excel. He is doing this purely out of his passion to learn new things which had been left behind, and I know how happy he feels when doing so.
So friends, if we have the determination to keep learning and being active throughout our life, age will become just another number.

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