The Power of Youth

I was cleaning my childhood room today and found an old essay I wrote when I was about 17. upon re-reading it, I liked it quite a bit, and wanted to re-print it:

The Power of Youth
Brendan Jones O'Connor

     It is said that youth is wasted on the young; everyday I try to disprove that statement. Adults tend to forget their times as children and adolescents, so it makes sense they are the ones to criticize the ways of youth. Few can accurately recall when their thinking became abstract, their bodies when through metamorphosis, and yet their heart remained divided over childlike assertions and the uncertainty of the teenage years. I, even as a later teen, retrospectively cannot always relate to the fears of my 12-year-old self. My heart has transitioned from early teenage confusion of identity, to the forward looking mindset of a young adult who will soon be off at college. Somewhere in my transition, I became happier, more self-assured, and optimistic. Maybe it is because in my path to adulthood, I regained an early childlike element that I forgot about in my more turbulent 11-15year-old times: a sense of wonder.
     A child look at a rolling field and thinks not about how thousands of year of glacial movements carved the land they are standing on, or how the town hired landscape developers to add to the ascetics, or even about the potential danger of the UV rays from the noonday's sun. Rather, the child can only recognize the wonder of this body of land they had never seen before. They can prance up and down the green openness with a sense that it's awesome, and they go to bed that night thinking of all the other cool places they have yet to discover. It is whit that lens I often try to see the world.
     I defend my youthful optimism with a quote from the poem "Dreams" by Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes, "Hold fast to dreams, for when dreams go/life is a barren filed/Frozen with snow." The road of life stretches so far ahead of me, and I have only begun. I look to the future, because I know it holds dreams, so long as I reach for them. Without youth, we will forget what life can be, for often it is the least tainted eyes that reviles the most truth. We will forget that every moment of every day is not entitled to us, but a fleeting gift. Without youth, we will not remember that the time we do have is a canvas for our dreams. With the power of youth, a life is allowed to be all it was meant to be, do all it was meant to do, and live how it was supposed to live.

I tell high school seniors that the biggest thing I miss from high school is the brimming sense of optimism. That's not to say I am a pessimist (because I really dislike those kind of people,) but that when one enters college and becomes more conscious of the adult world, one often is buffeted by disappointments and frustrations. But just reading something like this makes me look a little brighter.