Growing Older is Mandatory/Growing Up is Optional

Hi! This was shared to me via email:

I liked reading this short article from a friend. I hope you will, too. The first day of school our professor introduced himself and challenged us to get to know someone we didn't already know.

I stood up to look around when a gentle hand touched my shoulder. I turned around to find a wrinkled, little old lady beaming up at me with a smile that lit up her entire being. She said, "Hi handsome. My name is Rose. I'm eighty-seven years old. Can I give you a hug?" I laughed and enthusiastically responded, "Of course you may!" and she gave me a giant squeeze."Why are you in college at such a young, innocent age?" I asked.She jokingly replied, "I'm here to meet a rich husband, get married, and have a couple of kids..."

"No seriously," I asked. I was curious what may have motivated her to be taking on this challenge at her age. "I always dreamed of having a college education! and now I'm getting one!" she told me. After class we walked to the student union building and shared a chocolate milkshake. We became instant friends every day for the next three months we would leave class together and talk nonstop. I was always mesmerized listening to this "time machine" as she shared her wisdom and experience with me. Over the course of the year, Rose became a campus icon and she easily made friends wherever she went. She loved to dress up and she reveled in the attention bestowed upon her from the other students. She was living it up. At the end of the semester we invited Rose to speak at our football banquet. I'll never forget what she taught us. She was introduced and stepped up to the podium. As she began to deliver her prepared speech, she dropped her three by five cards on the floor. Frustrated and a little embarrassed she leaned into the microphone and simply said, "I'm sorry I'm so jittery! I gave up beer for Lent and this whiskey is killing me! ! I'll never get my speech back in order so let me just tell you what I know. "As we laughed she cleared her throat and began,

"We do not stop playing because we are old; we grow old because we stop playing.

There are only four secrets to staying young... being happy, and achieving success. You have to laugh and find humor every day. You've got to have a dream. When you lose your dreams, you die.We have so many people walking around who are dead and don't even know it!

There is a huge difference between growing older and growing up.If you are nineteen years old and lie in bed for one full year and don't do one productive thing, you will turn twenty years old. If I am eighty-seven years old and stay in bed for a year and never do anything I will turn eighty-eight. Anybody can grow older. That doesn't take any talent or ability. The idea is to grow up by always finding opportunity in change.

Have no regrets. The elderly usually don't have regrets for what we did, but rather for things we did not do. The only people who fear death are those with regrets."

She concluded her speech by courageously singing "The Rose." She challenged each of us to study the lyrics and live them out in our daily lives. At the year's end Rose finished the college degree she had begun all those years ago. One week after graduation Rose died peacefully in her sleep. Over two thousand college students attended her funeral in tribute to the wonderful woman who taught by example that it's never too late to be all you can possibly be. When you finish reading this, please send this peaceful word of advice to your friends and family, they'll really enjoy it! These words have been passed along in loving memory of ROSE.

REMEMBER, GROWING OLDER IS MANDATORY.GROWING UP IS OPTIONAL. We make a Living by what we get, We make a Life by what we give. God promises a safe landing, not a calm passage. If God brings you to it. He will bring you through it. Pass this message to people you care about. If you choose not, then you refuse to bless someone else……

to all the kids born in the 50s, 60s and 70s

I got this from a forwarded email:

TO ALL THE KIDS WHO WERE BORN IN THE

50s, 60s and 70s !!

First, some of us survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they carried us.
(sioktong ang inumin)

They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, fish from a can (brand: ligo) , and didn't get tested for diabetes.

Then after birth, our baby cribs were covered with bright colored lead-based paints , pati na yung laruang kabayu-kabayuhan.

We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets, no kneepads , sometimes wala ngang preno yung bisikleta.

As children, we would ride in car with no seat belts or air bags – hanggang ngayon naman, di ba ?
(jeep)

Riding in the back of a pick up on a warm day was always a special treat.
(maykaya kayo pare !)

We drank water from the garden hose and NOT from a bottle (minsan straight from the faucet)

We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle and NO ONE actually died from this. Or contracted hepatitis.

We ate rice with tinunaw na purico (dahil ubos na ang star margarine) , nutribuns courtesy of Macoy and drank softdrinks with sugar in it, but we weren't overweight kasi nga ..... .

WE WERE ALWAYS OUTSIDE PLAYING!!

We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on. Sarap mag patintero, tumbang preso , habulan taguan….

No one was able to reach us all day (di uso ang celfon , walang beepers). And we were O.K.

We would spend hours building our scooters or slides out of scraps and then ride down the street, only to find out we forgot the brakes. After running into the bushes a few times, we learned to solve the problem.

We did not have Playstations, Nintendos, X-boxes, no video games at all, no 99 channels on cable, no video tape movies, no surround sound, no cell phones, no personal computers, no Internet or Internet chat rooms....... ...WE HAD FRIENDS and we went outside and found them!



We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and there were no
lawsuits from these accidents. The only rubbing we get is from our friends with the words…..masakit ba ? Pero pag galit yung kalaro mo,ang sasabihin sa iyo…beh buti nga !

We play in the dirt , wash our hands a little and ate with our bare hands…we were not afraid of getting worms in our stomachs.


We have to live with homemade guns – gawa sa kahoy, tinali ng rubber band, sumpit, tirador at kung ano ano pa na pwedeng makasakit…..pero walang nagrereklamo.

Made up games with sticks (syatong)and cans (tumbang preso)and although we were told it would happen, wala naman tayong binulag o napatay…paminsan minsan may nabubukulan.

We rode bikes or walked to a friend's house and knocked on the door or rang the bell, or just yelled for them!



Mini basketball teams had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn't had to learn to deal with disappointment. Walang sumasama ang loob.



Ang magulang ay nandoon lang para tignan kung ayos lang ang mga bata…hindi para makialam.



This generation of ours has produced some of the best risk-takers, problem solvers and managers ever!



The past 50 years have been an explosion of innovation and new ideas.



We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned


HOW TO

DEAL WITH IT ALL!



And YOU are one of them!

CONGRATULATIONS!



You might want to share this with others who have had the luck to grow up as kids, before the government regulated our lives for our own good.


and while you are at it, forward it to your kids so they will know how brave their parents were.



Kind of makes you want to run through the house with scissors, doesn't it?!


PS - The big type is because your eyes may not be able to read this…. at your age

ok lang ba kaibigan?

Age is a small price to pay for maturity

Ten Commandments for the Middle-aged

I got this from an email sent by Chitoism, but it contained 9 only; the complete commandments can be found in this blog:

1. Face and accept the reality of getting old, its consequences and the limitations which growing old brings. Act and behave your age. Quit fooling yourself by trying to look like you were in your youth.

2. Focus on enjoying people, not on indulging in or accumulating material things.

3. Plan to spend whatever you have saved. You deserve to enjoy it and the few healthy years you have left. Travel if you can afford it. Don't leave anything for your children or loved ones to quarrel about. By leaving anything, you may even cause more trouble when you are gone.

4. Live in the here and now, not in the yesterdays and tomorrows. It is only today that you can handle. Yesterday is gone, tomorrow may not even happen.

5. Enjoy your grandchildren (if you are blessed with any) but don't be their full time baby sitter. You have no moral obligation to take care of them. Don't have any guilt about refusing to baby sit anyone's kids, including your own grandkids. Your parental obligation is to your children. After you have raised them into responsible adults, your duties of child-rearing and babysitting are finished. Let your children raise their own off-springs.

6. Accept physical weakness, sickness and other physical pains. It is a part of the aging process. Enjoy whatever your health can allow.

7. Enjoy what you are and what you have right now. Stop working hard for what you do not have. If you do not have them, it's probably too late.

8. Just enjoy your life with your spouse, children, grandchildren and friends. People, who truly love you, love you for yourself, not for what you have. Anyone who loves you for what you have will just give you misery.

9. Forgive and accept forgiveness. Forgive yourself and others. Enjoy peace of mind and peace of soul.

10. Befriend death. It's a natural part of the life cycle. Don't be afraid of it. Death is the beginning of a new and better life. So, prepare yourself not for death but for a new life.

I'm Getting On with the Years and So are You . . .

Before I turned Golden Boy last year, I prepared myself for it by buying and reading up on books dealing with the middle age (reckoned by various sources as between the ages of 35 - 65, so I'm right smack in the mean, or is it median? However, Chicken Soup for the Golden Soup is meant for those sexagenarians - 60 year olds for you). I sure need a roadmap to navigate that part of my life's journey. If, as they say, life begins at 40, then I will be 11 this November. :-)
Time Flies by Bill Cosby. Filled to the brim with wit and wisdom. A sampling:

• I wear glasses, primarily so I can look for the things that I keep losing.
• I am just like any typical nuclear physicist. My office may look messy, but I know where every atom is.
• "Don't worry about senility," my grandfather used to say. "When it hits you, you won't know it."
• I remember my wife's birthday because she announces it well in advance and momentously, the way astronomers announce Halley's Comet.
• Instead of writing it (a message) down, I decide to keep it in my head, perhaps because of all the room for it there.
• I am not a physicist, but I'm sure that the theory of the conservation of energy was discovered while watching an eight-year-old pretend to work.
• In my old neighborhood, a boy stopped playing when he began to lose his pulse. And then he became the referee.
• Never let the younger people know that you think a compact disc is a sturdy spine; and never say to them, "That was before your time," because the last full moon was before their time.
• In spite of the profound love I have for my wife, sex at my age has become exhausting, which leaves me yearning for a younger body, or longing for a good nap.
• If you put a boyish face on a man of seventy-three who can't bend over, you have a new kind of centaur - and the horse's ass is the man who had the surgery.
• What I pray is that all the parts of me do not shut down all at once. What the man of fifty has to avoid is an orchestrated falling-apart.
• Immortality is a long shot, I admit; but somebody has to be first.
• There is a saying that goes: Youth is a gift of nature; Age is a work of art. Well, I hate to disagree with Confucius or Hallmark, but if age is a work of art, the artist is one who belongs in the subway and not in the Louvre.
• Memory has a sugarcoater and we can never remember pain. (If women could remember pain, we would be a nation of single-child families)
• You can teach an old dog new tricks. You just don't want to see the dog doing them.

When My Parents were My Age, They were Old (Or Who are You Calling Middle-aged?) by Cathy Crimmins. Very funny justapositions between our parents' middle age and our middle age like: while our parents start to go gray and dye their hair, we begin putting highlights in ours to enhance its natural shine.

Body checklist for the mature: you use tweezers in places you've never thought before, you notice that dim lighting makes you look at least three years younger, sucking in your guts starts to feel natural, when you play sports you care less about winning than about finishing the game without getting hurt.

The Big Five-Oh! - Facing, Fearing and Fighting Fifty by Bill Geist.
Bill Geist takes comfort in the statistics that everyday 11,000 hits the big five-oh (one every 7 1/2 seconds). He starts his book with 50 ways to tell you're 50; here's some :
takes three times to call own kids by correct names, can't read menu, plays air-guitar to unplugged songs, ear hair, can't see own dick, leaves turn signal on, says "eh" and "huh" a lot, falls asleep (rather than passes out) at parties.


Ten Things I Wish I'd Known Before I Went out into the Real World by Maria Shriver. Armed with her Kennedy toothy trademark, Maria Shriver gives us a mouthful to wish we'd known before it's too late for us: pinpoint your passion, no job is beneath you, who you work for and with is as important as what you do, your behavior has consequences, be willing to fail, superwoman is dead...and superman may be taking viagra, children do change your career, marriage is a hell of a lot of hard work, don't expect anyone else to support you financially, and have lots of laughter in your life.