A BIRTHDAY GIFT

Yes, today it's my birthday and all I want is to forget about it. It makes me quite melancholic (or I'd better say sad?)  It is not any birthday,  it is a turning point in life and that's quite scary, you know. I don't feel like celebrating,  I feel more like escaping. Something I can't do, though.  I must stay here and face the ugly truth.

Anyway,  I have just found something which can console me a bit:  a  poem.  I'll  consider it the perfect gift arrived at just the right time.

A quote  from it has just been posted by a blogger I follow on tumblr.  I googled the name of the poet and found the whole poem. I like it, it touches my heart just in the place which hurts.   Thanks a lot for this beautiful gift, darling unaware blogger. 

YOUTH by Samuel Ullman

Youth is not a time of life—it is a state of mind. It is not a matter of red cheeks, red lips and supple knees. It is a temper of the will; a quality of the imagination; a vigor of the emotions; it is a freshness of the deep springs of life. Youth means a tempermental predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over a life of ease. This often exists in a man of fifty, more than in a boy of twenty. Nobody grows old by merely living a number of years; people grow old by deserting their ideals.

Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul. Worry, doubt, self-distrust, fear and despair—these are the long, long years that bow the head and turn the growing spirit back to dust.

Whether seventy or sixteen, there is in every being’s heart a love of wonder; the sweet amazement at the stars and starlike things and thoughts; the undaunted challenge of events, the unfailing childlike appetite for what comes next, and the joy in the game of life.

You are as young as your faith, as old as your doubt; as young as your self-confidence, as old as your fear, as young as your hope, as old as your despair.

In the central place of your heart there is a wireless station. So long as it receives messages of beauty, hope, cheer, grandeur, courage, and power from the earth, from men and from the Infinite—so long are you young. When the wires are all down and the central places of your heart are covered with the snows of pessimism and the ice of cynicism, then are you grown old, indeed!