Are You Growing Up or Just Growing Old?... By Lanre Olagunju

The reality that life is short should always be paramount in our minds. The shortness of our numbered days becomes more perceptible when we view life as a countdown which indeed is. As each day passes we increase without even knowing it because at the tick of each second, we automatically grow older in age.

Everyone was born little and with virtually nothing apart from the beautiful birthday suit we came in, but, while some grow up into maturity by taking charge of life and its endless adventures and prospects, others just grow old acquiring so much numbers like the calendar.

It was said that “the error of the age, is to believe that experience is a substitute for intelligence. While the error of the youth is to believe that intelligence is a substitute for experience, but the truth is that old or young we must never stop growing”

When we stop growing we can’t but stink like the most rotten of eggs. As young people of this great nation, who were been recently referred to as untapped resources by the Managing Director of the World Bank, Dr Ngozi Okonjo Iweala. If we must become relevant in restoring our country’s lost glory, and become a source of joy to our generation, we mustn’t only grow old just like every other creature or thing, we must grow up and be resourceful.

Signs of maturity include, the ability to ask thoughtful and mind blowing questions. The mind that asks is a growing mind. Though there isn’t any crime in not knowing, but what’s the beauty and pride in not wanting to know? If Isaac Newton had simply picked up the apple and chewed it up, rather than questioning why it fell, he probably wouldn’t have discovered the law of gravity.

The ability to see beyond “now” as always been a trait of maturity and this has nothing to do with age. As we grow, our ability to picture a desirable future and work painstakingly to ensure that the future materializes is a brilliant quality of development.

A child would always demand for momentary and transient things, developed minds are more concerned with delaying gratification and solving problems be it minor or major. So many others, whose lives are dependent on theirs will be at ease. “When I was a child, I spoke as a child; I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” Were the words of Saint Paul.

A child is always self centered and has no reason to think otherwise, a child will cry and complain when demands are not accurately met, if you must grow and become relevant, you should complain less and be more grateful and thankful even for little things. Rather than been self centered, take off the concentration off yourself and care for people genuinely, be more concerned with solving national and global problems rather than been a burden. Achieving this would require that you read wide, think wide, surround yourself with intelligent people, think critically and at the same time by purposing to be a happy person who can smile even at the face of seemingly hopeless situation.