© 2023 Margarita Niño
© 2023 Urantia Association of Quebec
Margarita Child
Montreal
The year is the most commonly used unit of time to measure human life.
Everyone knows the date of the year which marks the passage of a unit in their individual counter… In early childhood, it is the adults who measure and compare the length, growth and progress of their offspring.
During primary education, the grades obtained set a pace of growth as the years pass and time begins to leave traces, either joyful or sad, of triumphs or failures, of success and satisfaction or stagnation and frustration inside and outside the home. Life smiles at us, but not always. Many happy children cry and many children do not cry, although happiness lives far from their environment.
Adolescence arrives and time sets other goals for each subject, year after year. Intelligence on the one hand and hormones on the other pull the young man and make him desperate, make him angry, put him in conflict with himself and with all the rest of humanity, and at the end of each year, nothing is evident, except physical growth, which causes other leaps, either by excess or by deficiency, the gain in height in centimeters or weight in grams.
Adulthood finally arrives. The years then become expensive if they are years of university studies, or painful if they are years of hard work. They are years of relationships and collaborations, years of division of labor, of fighting for wages, of thinking about children… These years are generally all equal or marked by continuous changes, not always favorable. In one way or another, they never stop running.
Half a century arrives. We must think about retirement. During the next twenty years, life goes on and people make very different decisions, choose very curious and insane or very well thought-out plans; succeed or fail, fall seriously ill or remain relatively healthy, without this meaning great satisfaction for their retirement, with a good, bad pension or with no pension at all… it is common for almost everyone to feel mistreated by… a cause that is dear to them. Half a century arrives. We must think about retirement.
Finally comes the entry into old age. The number eighty of the countdown is about to arrive and as my lovely aunt Eli used to tell me:
“Why have we been taught how to speak, study, work, take care of our health, treat others and many other things, while no one has taught us how to grow old?”
Let’s look back at the passage of time of those who have already completed their journey, and learn the lessons they have left us on how to age in the best way.