Forever Young

First, listen to this song!

This song is just one of those songs that gets to me. It is haunting. It is meaningful. It is how I feel.

I am not sure if it is hitting thirty, or if it is having a child, but life has truly taken on a whole new meaning to me. I find it to be so fleeting, so important, so magical. Maybe it is because I see my little girl seeing the world for the first time: I am looking through her eyes and I am in awe.

More than that though, I am looking at her, and I see the innocence in her, and the honest perspective from which she views the world. Pure. Beauty. Untouched. And I want to be her.

Do you really want to stay forever, forever young?

The honest question.

The honest voice.

-- Pure.

I do.

I want to live forever young.

I want everyone to live forever young. In that honesty.  In that purity. Where all there is is open eyes, looking out, wondering -- eagerly trying to learn, love and be part; without questioning any of it. Without knowing yet about pain, or conflict, or judgment. I wonder what it would be like, our world, if we lived in this space?

--

What is it about youth that holds such appeal? Such a way of breaking our hearts? I wonder about that as much as I wonder why this song has such an impact on me. It is both because of its sentiment and because of its age. Not only is the song about staying young, its message resonates: it echos and reinforces the passing of twenty years of my life. I know this song. I've known it for twenty years. I knew it from a different place as a young girl. It was a pretty song then. And I know it as a woman. And it is a penetrating song now: Youth is like diamonds in the sun/ And diamonds are forever. I am that little girl, forever, who first listened to this song. Yet now I am a woman hearing it. And time has passed. I have aged. In this song, I am both.

--

A melody like this is rare: it captures the free-ness of being young. I picture little children spinning carelessly as it plays -- Some are like water, some are like the heat/Some are a melody and some are the beat. And I am there. I am watching and yet I am spinning as well. Carefree once again, like I once was.

The lyrics also assert our urge to be something important -- and that excitement that we will be something important: hope -- expectancy -- of things to come. That feeling that begins to fade as life's course becomes more concrete.

I watched the movie Friends with Money and one of the characters had hit her mid-life and began to feel she was perishing. There was nothing left to which she looked forward. She was no longer the shining and hopeful diamond. She was the rock. She was fading; she was dying, and she mourned her youth in her decay.

I want to stay forever young.

I never want to decay. I want to dance freely; to be unapologetic; to always aspire and hope. Like a child, I want to not know what it is to be self-conscious. I want to be the girl I was when I first heard this song. And yet I want to be the woman I am now who actually appreciates it.

Because now I can watch my daughter be the shining, hopeful diamond, and I can share in the glimmer of possibility and purity.

And I know now to appreciate it. When we are young life is expansive and time ticks slowly--it is hard to understand life's importance; today, time seems to move so fast and life closes in quickly. Where once everything was a possibility, I am now learning that So many dreams are swinging out of the blue...

And so I suspend myself in this song, on this page, and I say, Let us dance for a while...

Let us dance together, in our youth and in our age -- let us not mourn our decay, let us stay forever young -- knowing that we are all

Sitting in the sandpit, [and]
life is a short trip.

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