On growing up.

I’d rather not grow up.  However, I’m working against myself.

Yesterday, I took, and passed, my licensure test for Social Work. (YAY!) I would seem that I am becoming an adult very quickly.

With the word “future” looming at me in the distance, I’m faced with having to make decisions, or perhaps, to start thinking about decisions that need to be made.

My friends keep telling me, “growing old is compulsory, growing up is optional.”

- Bob Monkhouse

By passing the licensure exam, it puts me one step closer to putting the letters LSW behind my name, and one step closer to a professional career. 

I have absolutely no idea what direction to go into.  Public Health? Policy? Macro Practice? Community Organizing?

I’m waiting for one experience to happen and decide everything for me, but “life isn’t a wish-granting factory”, so that’s not happening anytime soon.  (Thanks to John Green for that unfortunate nugget of truth.)

But growing older brings such wonderful adventures, it brings new people into our lives, it brings new experiences, new cities, new jobs, new blessings.  Who isn’t excited, and terrified, for that?

Growing up isn’t easy, it’s messy, and painful, and yet, it’s fun. It’s the adventure we all get to have.

Don’t take life too seriously; no one gets out alive anyway.  Enjoy life.

(I know, I know, it’s bleak humor, but it is true!)

I read another of Dr. Byock’s books, and it’s called “The Four Things That Matter Most”.

These four things are:

1. Please forgive me,

2. I forgive you,

3. Thank you, and

4. I love you. 

Throughout the book Dr. Byock discusses how people who were facing death and their families found healing through saying these four things.  But the larger theme is that instead of saving these things for the end of our life, we should live by these statements.

Say them daily.  Your relationships will be that much deeper and stronger than you ever imagined.  For this is simply admitting that we are inevitably human.