use before

Inspired by Sami’s comment on our blog. And also by her post on her blog here.

I used to think that if I did a cartwheel every single day, I’d never stop being able to do a cartwheel. Even when I got really old, I’d still be able to do a cartwheel because hey, I’d done one the day before. Getting old was really intimidating when I was five. I wanted to stay young and able to do cartwheels forever, because while I didn’t necessarily love doing cartwheels all that much, not being able to do them sounded terrifying.

Of course, I assumed that I would still want to do cartwheels when I was eighty. When I was five, I didn’t understand that getting old was gradual. I thought that life was kind of like driving through a tunnel—everything stays pretty much the same until suddenly, you’re out in the blinding sunlight and you’re old.

Maybe I’m not really old enough to be writing about getting old, but there is something about the finality of age that seems like it is more terrifying to the young than to the old. When you’re five or sixteen or seventeen, eighty just seems really, really old. But by the time you’re actually eighty, you have all these amazing memories and life experiences to look back on, and you hopefully get to realize that you have lived for eighty pretty fantastic years. It's not like a tunnel, like I used to think; as far as I know, you don't wake up one day and think, Oh my gosh, I'm old. You're simply yourself, just like you were yourself the day before. Everything looks the same, even though it's just a little bit different.

Everything has an expiration date. I don’t necessarily want to be able to do a cartwheel when I’m eighty anymore. Instead, I want all kinds of idealistic, romantic things to have happened, and I want to still believe that real life can be magical if I let it. Maybe I’ll want something different for my future self in five or ten years, but even though I know that my ideas and the way that I see the world right now all have an expiration date, they’re a permanent part of who I am right now. If the way that I see life changes even a tiny bit every day, then things will never stay exactly the same. Change makes life fascinating, and so do expiration dates.