THE BOY INSIDE ME

Notes of Concern…

                               …Jackson Blair

The Boy Inside Me

Some people call it your “soul.” 

Others call it the “little voice” inside you.

Sometimes it is called your “conscience.”

Inside all of us is someone who speaks to us each day as we drive along highways alone, as we sit in our chairs in silence, as we go about our everyday activities. It is a constant conversation we have quietly with ourselves, or with the little person inside us.

I do not know what it is to be called but I think of it as the “boy inside.” I use the term “boy” because when he talks to me, or provides input into my thoughts, it the “young me” always. I have been wrestling with this concept for some time. I have especially wrestled with it as I aged.

When I looked at my father in his sixties I thought of him as an old man. Now that I am in my sixties the “boy inside” that speaks to me daily is not an old man. When I contemplate actions, evaluate circumstances, or think about things, I do so as a much younger man.

The voice inside me is not a contemporary one. It is one from many years ago. It is the boy I once was.

My experience has caused me to conclude that as any person’s body ages and others think of them as “old” primarily based on appearance, the way one thinks, and the voice within, is always young. I do not look at things as an older man. When I contemplate things I do so as a man much younger than I really am. This causes me to wonder if this explains why so many “old” people seem youthful, understand young people, seem to have more vitality than they should given their age and the deteriorating condition of their bodies.

Maybe as our bodies show the number of years we have lived, the “soul,” the “little voice inside,” the voice that talks to us throughout our lives, keeps us young at heart,

It is a difficult topic to wrap oneself around. It is not easy to write about it. But I have an appreciation today of how my father must have felt in his sixties. It is an appreciation that would have been difficult to understand before I was in my sixties myself. And had I enjoyed such an understanding then the communications between us would have been so different.

This understanding brings happiness. I realize that although my father looked old, and perhaps acted old, and certainly was old, inside himself he did not think of himself as old. His outlook, his views, his perceptions were much as they were when he was younger. He really lived as a younger man all his life.

Perhaps we are all “young at heart” until death comes to us. It comforts me to think that is the case.

So I am comfortable with the thought that there is a “boy inside” me, a boy who talks to me and informs me each and every day from a point of view more accurately described as “young” even though by all outward signs I am “old.”

I know this "boy" and he knows me and we have walked through life side by side for six decades. We are comfortable with one another and especially when I am alone I cherish his companionship. He is my youth and continually fills me with a young perspective on life.

This inner voice provides each aging person the opportunity to accept that visually to others they are “elderly” while knowing deep inside themselves they are eternally young.

What a blessing.