age
Have you had one of those days when, your birthday is about a week away, and you can’t remember your age anymore?
I’ve had that happen to me today while I was in the shower as I contemplating what I would be doing for my birthday.
Mom and I have plans, so we’ll be having lunch and maybe shop at the local mall.
A few hours ago, I was just watching the movie, Big. It’s a fantasy, comedy, drama-type of flick that made me think about the inner child in each of us.
From what I observed — this is probably the fourth time I have only seen this movie — children, adults, and seniors are not all that different.
We will have differences with our body development, wealth of knowledge, experiences, and language, but what we have in our cores is ageless; we all just interact with each other differently because of age.
Children get into fights, and so do adults, but what makes the arguments different are the matters and topics involved, how each person in the conflict try to communicate their concerns and ideas, and how both individuals resolve their conflicts.
I also watched Cocoon this weekend. It also made me ponder about the basic needs of people in different age groups.
In the beginning of the movie, elderly people at a convalescent home needed aid for bathing, eating, and use of the restroom. They also depended on nurses and doctors with their health and various medicinal prescriptions. But, at the turning point of the movie (and I will not spoil it by revealing too much information), the elderly people had been rejuvenated, and were exhibiting signs of youthfulness — one old man wanted to stay up all night and party, a woman wanted to dance all night with her husband.
Clearly, there are sets of boundaries either socially defined or dictated by physical and mental development, about how an individual lives their life, but deep within each of us, there are still core components that transcend age and time.
I then thought of my current problems and how I resolve them, and it is so much more complex to work out solutions or strike compromises now, than it was back when I was eleven years old.
Some of my concerns when I was eleven years old were new jeans for school, the purchase of a new Nintendo video game cartridge, hair gel so that the girls at school would talk to me, visiting cousins in the city for the summer, deciding whether or not to do homework over the weekend, and riding my bike in the rain with the other neighbor kids.
These days, I deal with the 405 freeway traffic every weekday morning, performing a software serial number audit at work and troubleshooting e-mail server problems, planning for a retirement fund, buying a house, consolidating monetary loan payments, filing taxes, offloading media from a mobile phone to a personal computer, shaving, and cooking fish.
~kenohki
