Friday, January 1, 2010

Aging

You will not realize how much you have aged by just looking at yourself in the mirror.

Apart from white hairs and balding spots which will fleetingly make you feel insecure, you can certainly feel like your old young self trying to earn your spot in a dog-eat-dog world, just like when you first had work ages ago.

Apart from a different spending patterns on school books and tuition session fees as oppose to toy purchases, you can almost always feel that you are a new Dad trying to adjust to being a family man for the first time.

Apart from slightly changing destinations of where to spend more in malls such as visiting areas for PSPs, Wiis and other adolescent accessories and apparels as oppose to Toy Kingdom and ToysRUs, you can still feel the first time you took your kids in a mall to buy their stuffs as if it was yesterday.

Everything seems the same...

But stop and look around....see the people around you especially those you have not consistently seen over the years...and realize how much they have changed.

I have seen my parents recently and realized they have indeed aged far beyond i imagined them to be as old.

I have seen my sisters and my brother and realized how many of them are growing white hairs and are physically maturing fast. I have seen their teenage kids and realized how they have grown from whence i carried them in my arms when they were infants.

I have remembered friends and reminisced memories from my childhood years, and realized that a lot of them indeed are no longer playmates and schoolmates you call 'Padi' (Bicol dialect term literally means 'Pal' or 'Buddy' in the English vernacular) or 'Pare' or 'Tol' ('Pare' and 'Tol' are Tagalog dialect terms which are equivalent to 'Padi')but are 'Daddy','Father','Attorney', 'Doctor', 'Professor' or 'Congressman' to many people.

As these thoughts dawned on me, I realized too that in the last 2 years i have in fact lost 2 of my brothers to murder and heart attack and that we are no longer a brood of 4 brothers and 3 sisters but there are only 5 of us remaining.

As I looked at the mirror in this day beginning 2010, and looked at my kids and my wife, my life in the last 2 decades since i left my parents' home for the University, flashed before me like a documentary in NatGeo.

Indeed, i have aged enough and it has been quite a while since i was a kid and trying to believe that i am about to start a journey. In fact i just realized, it has been quite a journey for a while.

I feel strong and ready for more though, and i don't think I am old. But yes, i am halfway to where i wanted to be maybe.

But life i think has a lot more to offer in the next half of my life than anything it has given me in the first half.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]