Do I want to be older or younger?
A couple of weeks ago I wrote that I wished I was older. My grandma had just turned 90 and at a birthday party the weekend prior I was pleasantly surprised she’s in the dark about what’s going on in the world.
Coincidentally on her milestone birthday I was in Orlando with 120-plus kids for Air Canada’s Dreams Take Flight. After spending the day with pre-teens I wanted to be young again.
I’m torn: Do I want to be much older or much younger?
There are a lot of similarities between those two generations. Like my grandma, as I noted in the previous column, the kids have no idea who Stormy Daniels is, they aren’t ignoring me to focus on their phone – you know, all the things us who are familiar with pop culture fully understand and are potentially annoyed by.
While participating in Dreams Take Flight for the fourth time as a media I too was able to be a kid again and forget everything that was happening at home. Though I was there for work, I ignored the constant emails and scheduling of a regular workday to spend time with the kids and have some laughs.
It reminded me of a time of innocence. Most of us grew up living in the moment, looking forward to trivial things in life. It didn’t take much to make us happy. We look back on it now and see it as immaturity, perhaps, or as a life lesson to the bigger things.
What is strange is that it took a 90th birthday and a day with kids at an amusement park to see the parallels with the unlikely generations. It made me wonder if the group of kids and the group of seniors would be able to relate to each other and have better conversations than us in our 20s and 30s and 40s to with each other. (Although, we know how that goes nowadays thanks to social media and politics, etc.)
Seniors have lived life and experienced all the ups and downs. Kids are naive and unaware about what the future will hold. But for some reason they have a connection, in my mind anyway.
Take a moment to think about how people from different backgrounds really can connect and share the human experience. It doesn’t necessarily have to be age. Think about what we can learn from each other and how we can all grow together.
Oh yeah, and check out the highlights from Dreams Take Flight at dreams.jbonair.com.
