This past Saturday was my 24th birthday. I’ve now been an “adult” for a quarter of my life and it seems that birthdays are not the same. Gone are the extravagant parties filled with Party City decorations and gift bags. Gone are the invitations to cool kid party places. Gone are the days when all I dreamed of for a month was what I would open on the morning of my birthday. This Saturday I received new floor mats for my car and I was ecstatic. My 12-year-old self would have cried himself to sleep, but I am happy that I got something very useful and thoughtful. We change as we grow.
Everyone always jokes about the things that come with being an adult. Your 18th birthday means voting, military service, driving past midnight, clubs and porn. After that you have three years of excitement until you can legally have your first sip of alcohol. Once the magic of bar drinking wears off, the last big birthday is when you turn 26 and your insurance rates go down.
Growing old means we leave behind some of the magic from before. Yes you can still have a good time with friends drinking at a karaoke bar, but turning a year older really just means one more year of responsibilities added to your plate. Where before you were aching to be an adult and earn respect, now you fear what lies ahead and looking backward fondly, missing what you had.
It isn’t just society that changes as you get older. Every birthday of your adolescence meant your mind grew literally and figuratively. You would expand your knowledge in school while your body was busy expanding your brain. A recent study published in the Journal of Neuroscience and posted on pyschcentral.com says that evidence shows that our brain growth continues into our early twenties, possibly because of the continued education we received in schools like KSU. Our brains may continue growing, but we leave behind our imaginations.
Remember when we were kids and a stick could be a sword, cane, gun or a hastily needed splint? Now I see a stick as something I have to clear from my yard or remove from my car after a storm. That imagination gets pushed from our minds as we are forced to cram in 19th century British literature and trigonometry.
I say it’s time we fight back this loss of innocence and imagination. The next time you are walking across campus, grab a stick, turn to your classmate and yell “En Garde!” Don’t let the difficulties of higher education make you lose who you were. Instead of inviting your friends to get drunk with you for your next birthday, go to a playground and declare yourself king of the monkey bars! Take a few hours to reconnect with that ten-year- old you who cried tears of joy over his brand new Super Nintendo and worry about those college loans tomorrow. Numerous studies show that any type of high-energy activity helps improve your stress levels and your grades. A New York Times article said that students who regularly participated in vigorous physical activity had higher G.P.A.’s. What’s more vigorous than a few hours of Capture the Flag?
Take a lesson from someone who has been in college six years now, close the books, stop worrying about money and run around like an idiot.
Carl is a senior and an English major.
