Being Young: The Magic, The Mania And The Mistakes!

[I wrote this article as a part of my internship with Insightwalk. The article was first published here.]

How beautiful is youth! how bright it gleams with its illusions, aspirations, dreams! Book of Beginnings, Story without End, Each maid a heroine, and each man a friend!Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The vigor, the craziness, the intensity and the undying spirit of the youth have been glorified, condemned, critiqued and immortalized by the best musicians, lyricists, authors and poets of our times and of times gone by. The temptation to use clichés, truisms and adages about a theme so ubiquitously found in the works of great artists is indeed irresistible! Albert Camus, the Nobel-prize winning author once remarked, with remarkable economy and accuracy, that “the youth is above all a collection of possibilities.” It is this wide and limitless kaleidoscope of varied possibilities that sets the young apart from the old!

As a child enters his teens, a boundless, incomprehensibly large and mysterious world slowly begins to unravel in front of his virgin eyes and he begins to draw the contours of his world on the clean slate of his mind. With the onset and advance of puberty and adolescence, physiological and cognitive development begins taking place at a breathtaking pace and he experiences the marvel of the world around him. He wants to explore, discover, learn and create! He is full of energy and vivacity, never-tiring and forever curious, also, he is bound to make mistakes; mistakes that will make him a better man, mistakes that he must make! By the end of his teens, he is a bubbling, unstoppable packet of energy ready to burst forth and play his role on the stage of the world. Once, on the stage, ready to make defining career and academic choices, his mind buzzing with activity, his heart ready to fall for his beloved, his dreams, taking concrete shapes and his passions getting clearer and stronger, he sees a vast range and magnitude of options and choices available to him. The expanse of youth’s scope and ambition is limitless.

Being young gives you the power to believe that nothing, absolutely nothing, is impossible! The only tools necessary are your will power and a belief in yourself. Not that there are no weak moments or hesitations in the lives of the young. This period is characterized by intense, thought-process and decision making. The tough decisions and the defining moments may begin right from our school days. Remember those moments of indecision before participating in a debate competition? Or the fidgety nerves before a stage performance? Indeed, even in day to day lives, the conflicting adolescent emotions lead to many embarrassments and blunders! Haven’t we all, during school days, remarked something stupid in front of the opposite sex and regretted it later? Or have been at the receiving end of many a tricks and jokes? In high school and colleges, the stakes are raised higher. Every other decision seems to be like a momentous one. The choice of subjects and therefore profession, the selection of college, the kind of relationships, it seems we are fitting the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle of our life!  At each step, we are scripting our own future and writing our own destiny! 

Nobody has ever said that it’s easy to be young, but it’s definitely one hell of an experience! We might make the wrong kind of friends or get entangled in a complex relationship, but at the end of the day, it is all about learning and improving at every step. Of course, it is important not to get yourself in a lot of trouble, youth is a tender but decisive age to be in and our actions in this period of life can often dictate how we are going to spend the rest of our adult lives. But being too cautious and circumspect at this stage is the worst mistake that you can ever make. The magic of being young is that no one really minds if you make mistakes. Actually, the only mistake that the young can make is not doing or trying anything at all, everything else is a bend in the learning curve. What else is youth if not failing repeatedly until you find yourself, your goal and thereby, embark upon the journey to your success?

Let go of fear, let yourself free, dare to dream, try the impossible! Talk to that girl/boy you have been afraid to approach since a long time, wear your favorite dress even if it seems to be odd, learn to laugh at yourself, go for that sport you have always wanted to play but have shied away from, study the subjects which tingle your neurons, research a topic you love that no one else may touch and go for that adventure you have always been yearning for! For you are young; you can be stupid, smart, industrious, conventional, radical, superstitious, atheist, serious and fun-loving all at once!