Story-A-Day #15: It's Not Over Yet

IT'S NOT OVER YET

"You never really see it coming. Hell, you don’t even realize it’s happening until one day you wake up and every part of you is creaking."

"When we were younger, we used to play all the time. We would shoot hoops, get a group together and play baseball, skate around the outdoor rinks in an attempt at hockey. We would walk up the steep grade of the highway and scale the imposing rock cuts, pausing at the top to admire the view - and induce a bit of vertigo at the reckless height we had just scaled while the cars sped by below. We would canoe and kayak and swim our ways through the endless days of summer."

"We would walk from one end of the city to the other, pausing for a swim along the way, then we would about face and walk all the way back home. We would spend our winters careening recklessly down tree lined paths on our GT SnoRacers, weaving through narrow openings in the trees and launching off jumps, only to hike back up and do it again. We would do it all and it was nothing."

"Every day was an adventure."

"Then we got older. We got jobs and found ourselves perched on faux-leather chairs at desks instead of in the lofty heights of rocky cliffs or at the crown of an insurmountable oak trees, its labyrinth of branches a challenge that propelleed us to the slender twigs at the top. Now we work hard every day and find ourselves drained from the sedentary nature of our responsibilities. We tire easily and don’t make time for the games that once charged us with life and filled us with vitality."

"There’s no time to cut loose and do the stupid things we used to do. Reckless is now stupid; a quick way to die. With aching limbs and creaky knees, our death is now a looming fear in the not-too-distant future. A mid-August thunderstorm is no longer an occasion to run shirtless down the street. An icy hill dusted in snow is something that slows us down to baby sized micro steps, not a thing of beauty that merits a running start. Our baseball fields are overgrown, our hockey rinks buried in snow, and our basketball nets tattered reminders of an easier time. Our bodies are testaments to the punishment we put them through in our constant search for thrills."

"It doesn’t need to be that way. Adventure is still there to be had and our aches and pains are easily ignored when they are accompanied by the thrill of victory."

"You need to build a fort, take a different path, step away from your desk. It’s not over yet."

And with that, he stood up and wandered off into the crowd. He was right of course. It's never too later to be a kid again.