A lot of people go from lighthearted when young to bitter and caustic or indifferent as they get older. They might remain adequately friendly and cheerful in public, knowing well not to cross boundaries or publicly display animosity or show which side they are on. But inside, many of them tend to remain suspicious, angry, occasionally spiteful even, or at least disgruntled or indifferent. It’s a quiet hardening that happens over years, disappointments accumulate, trust gets broken enough times, and the world stops feeling like a place that rewards vulnerability.
So they adapt. They protect themselves.
And somewhere along the way, that protection becomes their personality.
And then there are a few, very few, the extremely few who somehow make the journey back to being lighthearted, or at least calm and cheerful. They bravely make that challenging journey back, having realized how people will be how they are, how life is too short to stay angry, the world could be as unrelenting as it can be, but they choose to be different. To return to innocence, as the song goes. To choose kindness over any other negative emotion they could and that the world would even allow and possibly support.
They choose to make a difference. These people aren’t naive. They have seen what everyone else has seen, felt what everyone else has felt. But they’ve decided that bitterness is a burden they’re no longer willing to carry. That’s courage, not weakness.
When you think about how most of us tend to go from lighthearted to bitter, the problem isn’t being caustic at one phase in your life or not, but rather of being stagnant or unchanging, and not knowing or daring to make the journey back to where one started from.
We treat our grown-up cynicism like wisdom, when sometimes it’s just calcification.
The real wisdom might be in recognizing when we’ve let the world make us smaller, meaner, more closed; and then choosing, deliberately and against the current, to open back up again.
