Why I Envy Youth

I’ll be talking about envy on this blog on occasion, as it’s my worst character trait and directly related to the despair I sometimes feel about life. Today I want to talk about the envy I often feel for my younger friends, of which I have many, some barely out of teenage-hood. I’ve thought a lot about this and haven’t really been able to articulate what it is that makes me envy them, wish to be them, but something I read recently in Peggy Orenstein's book Waiting for Daisy made it crystal clear:

“All of us reckon with dreams unfilled, with the limits our younger choices have placed on our later lives. All of us have to figure out how to move beyond that regret.”

That’s it in a nutshell, I think. Youth means you still have your dreams ahead of you. Anything is possible. The choices have not yet been made, the limits not yet in place, the regret not yet there.

I want to be in that place again, but it’s just not possible. How to deal with that? As near as I can tell: be grateful for the good choices I did make, that everything so far is turning out generally OK, that there’s some but not a lot I would go back and change (the biggest things being I would be more open to love, and more true to what I wanted to do). Sigh. Somehow that has to be enough.