WHY FIGHT AGAINST AGE? WHY NOT PUNCTURE THE MYTH OF HAPPY YOUTH AND RECOGNIZE THE FACT THAT WE NEVER REALLY ENJOY LIFE UNTIL WE ATTAIN TO THE FREEDOM AND PHILOSOPHY THAT ONLY YEARS BRING We all dread age and put up the best fight we can against it. As a nation we spend more on face powder than we do on gunpowder We undergo martyrdom of starvation for the sake of our waistlines that we would not suffer for any principle. Wild horses could not drag from us the secret of the number of birthdays we have celebrated, and there is no compliment we esteem so highly as to be told we look young, and no insult that we resist so bitterly as being called old. If given our choice of what age we would like to be, we would remain perpetually in the 20s. In fact, many women remain a static 28 for years and years and years, and perhaps none of us ever go over the top of the 30s without a little cold chill in our hearts and the feeling that we are leaving the best of life behind us. For a superstition has grown up about youth that we believe in as devoutly and with as little basis in fact as babes do in Santa Claus, that causes us to think that youth is a period of unalloyed joy when one has never a care in the world and is bubbling over with high spirits, and that as we grow older we pass from this smiling land of sunshine into one where there is nothing but trials and tribulations and where we have even lost our power of enjoyment. We can all recall how, when we were in our teens, we pitied the aged people in their 30s who had nothing left in the way of pleasures and amusements and how, when we were in our 30s, we wondered that anybody could even desire to live beyond 60. As we grow older, however, we find out that this sympathy is misplaced, and that it is not youth that should pity us, but age that should pity youth. For, to quote Brownings phrase, the best of life is the last, for which the first was made. For it takes us half a lifetime to learn how to live. Youth isn't the happiest time of life. It is the most miserable because we have then no perspective, no sense of value. We have not found but that nothing lasts; we have not found out that there is a law of compensation that always works, and we have not acquired a philosophy with which to meet the disappointments of existence. Chelsea Physic Garden, London Established in 1673 by the Society of Apothecaries to cultivate rare plants. In 1722 Sir Hans Sloane conveyed the Physic Garden to the Apothecaries. The celebrated Chelsea Cedars, which stood one on each side of the entrance to the Garden, were planted about the year 1683. One lived till 1878, the other till 1903. The things that we laugh at in later life are heart breaking tragedies to the young. If a boy and girl cannot go to a party to which all the other youngsters of their set are going, they feel that it is no use trying to live on in a world so filled with disappointments We older ones shrug our shoulders and know that there will always be plenty of parties, and if we cant go to one tonight there will be a better one tomorrow night. The self conscious girl and boy endure agonies of shame if they cannot have the latest things in sports wear. They feel that all eyes are upon them We oldsters know how unimportant we are, and that everybody is so concerned with their own affairs that they dont even notice us. The most disgraced woman in the world is not more humiliated than the girl who has not a date for the football games or who is a wallffower at a ball. No man who ever sees his ambitions crash in ruins about him is more disappointed than the boy who cannot even buy a second hand Ford. And it is one of the compensations of age that we are spared so many of the minor afflictions of life, and that we learn to make substitutes for the things we want and cant get. Youth thinks that age has no enjoyment, but, in reality, it takes age to teach us how to enjoy. Youth gulps down pleasure as a hungry man does food, caring only that there be a lot of it. But age savors pleasure as a gourmet does a feast, appreciating every delicate flavor, every surprise in taste, every vintage of the wine. Once I went on a long journey to far lands with a number of girls and boys. At first I was envious of them, thinking how wonderful it was that they had the privilege of seeing historic and romantic places while they were young and having all of this knowledge, these memories, to enrich their lives. But it was not long before I discovered that I was getting a hundredfold more out of the trip than they were because they had not lived long enough to know what it was all about. Places that to me were romance and historic, to them were a ruined and battered house or a stretch of ground and nothing more. Where I thrilled and palpitated, they were bored. And youth is slavery. Age is freedom. Youth is enslaved to its own traditions, to its own conventions, to what its gang is doing and saying and thinking. It must dress and act and use the same language and take the same point of view as all the other boys and girls are doing From one end of the country to the other youth is a rubber stamp of its generation. It does not dare to be original. But age is emancipation. When you are old you can do exactly as you please. You can dress like a fashion plate or wear your old clothes. You can say what you think. You can be sweet and amiable or cantankerous. And the most that will be said about you is that you are eccentric. So considering all these things and the further compensation that age furnishes a perfect alibi for doing what we want to do and leaving undone those things which we do not wish to do, how strange it is that we dread age! How stupid of us not to welcome it as a friend instead of an enemy! What a mistake not to run out and meet it instead of pushing it away as long as we can! For, in all good truth, the last of life is the best. DOROTHY DIX.