J is just of of her teens so it was interesting to read these lines from The Girl In Her Teens - a book I chanced upon by accident and definitely not my speed. Not withstanding there was some wisdom here:
It sometimes seems as if Shakespeare must have been thinking of the adolescent period of life when he said:
"There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries"
The teen age is the period where the battle for an honest, clean, pure, righteous type of manhood and womanhood must be waged and won. Having realized this, it now remains for us to bend all our energies and summon all our skill to meet the task.
There is definitely something to be said for the window of opportunity that the teen years offer in a person's life. My own teenage years were far from taking the tide at a the flood. It was a period of intense confusion, distraction and no strong sense of purpose. In hindsight, whatever was accomplished then and in years to follow was from keeping the inertia of motion going and not stopping entirely. The activities were not focused in a specific direction but there was some forward movement all the same. And yes, there were many lost years bound in shallows and in miseries, followed by some redemption.
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