cleveland854321: GROWNG OLD GRACEFULLY

I'm not young anymore, though I often wish that I still were. I'm forty-four years old. I'll be forty-five years old next year. I'll be one hundred years old on 2068. The clock keeps ticking regardless of whether or not we're ready for it. And an event that we once thought occurred yesterday ends up being over fifty years in the past. We don't like to think that fifty years could fly past so quickly nor would we want to think that forty-four years could race by any quicker. Time is both wonderful and cruel. If there's something we hate very much, time can reassure us that such a horrible situation will someday end and be replaced by something wonderful. However, time is also cruel. Here we are having the time of our lives and someday we'll all end up in the afterlife. I'm forty-four years old and it will take me sixty-six years before I'm ready to turn one hundred years old. And I'm sure the next sixty-six years will fly by just as quick.

Here's a joke that one person told me. That a group of people kept waiting for a huge life changing event to take place. The event never occurred and the group of people became frustrated. The punchline was that the event these people kept waiting already arrived fifty years ago and they never realized that the utopia that this group of people waited in vain for was right there in front of their faces the entire time. Sometimes happiness wears a face that we're not accustomed to. Sometimes happiness takes a form that we're not expecting. Sometimes happiness arrives in a manner that we're not expecting either. Sometimes we need to be flexible enough to realize that GOD works in a manner that we're not expecting or anticipating. And that's ok. It's a mistake to expect GOD to work according to our design, but rather we should work according to GOD's design instead.

Nastia Liukin, Alicia Sacramone, and Shawn Johnson