[HoneyBadger]

By the way, concerning the last link, and considering that the question of age being balanced against maturity comes up often enough on these forums that it's worth discussing.

I'm finding, the more I age-and I'm aging quite fast and not terribly well-the more I recognise that I'm the same person I always was. The thing that has made me who I am-this person that I consider to be more or less an adult, has been accumulated knowledge and experience, added on to-but not replacing-the child that I was. There was no great transition, no vast shifting from one form to another, just a recognition that I was expected to 1: grow--in depth, knowledge, power, competence, dignity, open-mindedness, whatever the things are that lead to the respect we wish for ultimately as adults (for, after losing all the greatness, the godliness, of youth, that respect is the only thing we have to replace it with, love-however wonderful, being no trump to time, your mind however quick and sharp, inevitably becoming outmoded and outpaced by the sheer speed of the world as it passes you by, and dignity perhaps having gone last, but most thoroughly of all.)--and 2: to make a bunch of really hard choices, the first of which was what kind of adult-and how much of an adult-did I want to be?

Being an "adult" and being a "child" both have their benefits, and downsides. There's no reason you have to lose your sense of wonder, your spirit and energy-atleast mental energy-your beliefs, your own legends, and the magic that lives within you-as an adult. I think we often fear that to keep the good parts of being a child will cost us something-cost us some of that respect that we dearly, desperately crave as an elixer against Time. And it may. There's often a price to pay for magic, after all. But, if we hold on to that inner child, the fantastical child of wonder that we carry within us, then that child will grow, as we grow, into an adult-powerful, knowledgeable, dignified, mature. Demanding and deserving of respect, even as our bodies grow and age.

Because as we grow, and make the hard choices, and live the hard lives that this world demands, and keep our Selves from being swallowed up by Despair, our spirits grow, even as our bodies age. And as we use our imaginations, building upon them, creating an inner world of ever-increasing complexity and depth, our spirits are able to live and breath and open up windows through which our inner worlds and the outer World can flow together, and we can come to recognise each within the other. And our spirits, through our child's belief and faith, and our adult's open eyes and hard-gained wisdom, might indeed live on forever, beyond the respect, beyond a lovely well-attended funeral of this world, to a Heaven of our own making-born from every myth that we embrace and reality that we endure-that we build in our own imaginations, and live every day, and in dying, pass on to Something that we have Foreseen.