Today I am getting 32 years old. And it is only natural that my birthday makes me think about aging and the passing of time. We live in a culture where after a certain age birthdays are not associated with presents and a birthday cake but with yet another year in the liability of our youth. As a culture we seem to be at war with the transition of time, perceiving aging as a failure to stay young. In countless ways the youth-oriented Western culture projects on us the image of youth as the only age of happiness that we should go corners to preserve: by using cosmetics, drinking suspicious concoctions, doing plastic surgery, etc. Brainwashed by this culture we associate age with approaching the zone of suffering, sickness and isolation. But we also live in times of raising self-awareness and transformation of the old paradigms. Ageism is a paradigm that certainly needs transformation. We need to realize that the wrinkle-less skin does not by itself make us happy, neither the growing number of candles on our birthday cake turns us into feeble, unproductive and unworthy old people. It is the light we carry inside us that keep us young. It is our energy, our passions, the boldness of our dreams, the spread of our wings. We stay young as long as we remember how to love, how to learn, how to dream and go after our dreams. We stay young, no matter the years and the wrinkles. Today, I am celebrating youth. The inside youth. And my only birthday wish is to have the courage and wisdom to meet each coming year with joy, fulfillment and insatiable enthusiasm. And because I cannot treat you with a birthday cake, I would instead share with you the moving essay "Youth"of Samule Ullman. If you want to make me birthday present - just read it!

Youth

"Youth is not a time of life—it is a state of mind. It is not a matter of red cheeks, red lips and supple knees. It is a temper of the will; a quality of the imagination; a vigor of the emotions; it is a freshness of the deep springs of life. Youth means a tempermental predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over a life of ease. This often exists in a man of fifty, more than in a boy of twenty. Nobody grows old by merely living a number of years; people grow old by deserting their ideals. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul. Worry, doubt, self-distrust, fear and despair—these are the long, long years that bow the head and turn the growing spirit back to dust. Whether seventy or sixteen, there is in every being’s heart a love of wonder; the sweet amazement at the stars and starlike things and thoughts; the undaunted challenge of events, the unfailing childlike appetite for what comes next, and the joy in the game of life. You are as young as your faith, as old as your doubt; as young as your self-confidence, as old as your fear, as young as your hope, as old as your despair. In the central place of your heart there is a wireless station. So long as it receives messages of beauty, hope, cheer, grandeur, courage, and power from the earth, from men and from the Infinite—so long are you young. When the wires are all down and the central places of your heart are covered with the snows of pessimism and the ice of cynicism, then are you grown old, indeed!"