Being someone people can look up to

I got to thinking about this topic as I writing my last blogpost.

Because I remember being a little girl, and the magical way you'd look up at people that were older. And not just because they were taller. I don't just mean "physically look up."

Somehow, everyone who was older, just seemed so cool. Like they had their life figured out. And the key word is "like." It's all about the illusion. I mean, be it true or not. Who really does have their life figured out? And at what age? Certainly not me. Far from it.

What does it even mean, "to have your life figured out"? Because, is it having dreams and plans? If that's what it meant, I certainly have both, but my life feels far from "figured out."

The reason I suggest that that's what that phrase would mean, what life would be all about, is because it seems no matter how much you could have your life planned out, that it will still be full of surprises (which is in its own way fun isn't it? But surprises aren't always good or fun) and not be the way you planned. Stray from it.

In that case, if there's uncontrollable confounding variables that we will never be able to control in that planned experiment that we try to do that is our life...exclude them completely. If they're not part of the experiment, they're not part of what we consider "figured out," right? Because they happen anyway, we can't control them.

But that doesn't exactly work. Because a counterexample already is me. Lots of dreams I have, and detailed plans too. And yet...like I've already said, that life is not a straight perfect line. There have been so many times I think I'm done dealing with a certain type of issue, I want to be done with it, and I brutally learn it is not that easy. Oh well, a lot of life is about acceptance. It can't be easy, because what would be the fun in that? People say they want things easy, sometimes it might be nice...especially a break or closure. Life can't always be hard, because we can't recover or move forward. But that's thing. Because we wouldn't survive that way, we do recover and move forward. We force ourselves to because we are forced to. Humans are very good at that, I think. At knowing when they can live a certain way, how they can live, how they must live to keep living (move forward) and automatically doing what's best in order to keep living and moving forward.

It's funny when as a kid, you look up to someone because at the time, they are so many life steps ahead of you. But oftentimes, you catch up and where they stand or once stood in life, compared or not to you, is not all that crazy. I think of the people that I would think as "so much older" or so much ahead in life, and now it's like, we aren't (which means we weren't) that far apart in age. Or life in general. And I mean sure naturally those people who are older than you are ahead, but well, it'd be concerning and bad if they weren't right, for their sake? Everyone grows up and moves forward.

Isn't it crazy too, how we always chase age? And look at those people older and think how since their age sounds so impressive, their disposition in life too, right? I think that's a big part of it. If the age sounds big and scary...they must have it all figured out right? And no one wants to have a scary big number for their age and reveal to people...to anyone, that they don't have it all figured out. Because that would probably be considered embarrassing. We consider that embarrassing, isn't that interesting?

But when we get to that age, we're like "wow, I don't feel so crazy. I don't feel so wise. I don't know how they felt at this age, but I certainly don't feel how I imagined they felt. And I certainly, certainly, don't have it figured out." Maybe it's just me. But it is true, that with life, struggles continue in all ages, no matter how they change. They change with age. Things you haven't deal with before, suddenly you're dealing with. Perhaps that is why most people look at when they were a child once they're older and start reminiscing those simple times when you virtually had NO struggles. Thinking, "why did I want to grow up so bad?" this sucks. But of course, a child doesn't know that. And that's just the natural course of life. If a child didn't look up with hope, with a little bit of impatience and jealousy, that wouldn't be good either, would it? That's how we keep life moving forward.

You will never take away the magic that that child feels, looking up to someone who is older who to them, is just a hero and so cool just by being older. Maybe it's cool things they have accomplished, or things the child wants someday too, or cool just to see how life could play out and what life could have in store for them, like watching a movie (will my life have this too? Does my future hold this too?). But being older, is all it takes. To a child, though, that is dreams and hopes right there. A lens they can look out of. They want what the grownups have.

I think of being someone that someone looks up to and think to myself "no, little do they know how much I'm struggling." Hard to even imagine.

But maybe throughout all of this I am not cutting enough slack, could that be? That things are difficult, and no one said it would be easy, and we do still come far. And so maybe, to that child, we can still be a hero.