There is no time to wait.

As we are dragged pitilessly into the unknown future youth comprehends itself at the moment that it begins to slip out of our hands. A fleeting transitory pause at the cusp of adulthood gives us an adult perception, the cursed blessing of retrospect, of our pre-adult selves. For a few short years we can appreciate, and be conscious of the full energy, ambition, and potential we embody in youth as we still contain it within us, but as time presses on we must account for ourselves. The experience of noticeable decay, sloth, tiredness, lethargy-most of all boredom with the repetitiveness of all actions, all formerly exciting, inspiring phenomena, demands a response; some kind of counter assault on aging.

But was does this mean exactly? There are visible trends that attend to preserving the life of the aging. There are predominant methods the old use to make themselves appear full of life. Construction and accumulation are the most known. A massive edifice, it is assumed, built up around the living person ascending in years can create the illusion of permanence. This cumulative project - the bringing together of objects to create a world of one's own, a vast array of instruments of pleasure and leisure - can at most be a location of the enactment of life. The space on its own has never, and will never contain life equivalent to the will of human consciousness. But as the aging person sinks lower and lower into the depths of their architectural security, is there a point at which they are no more than the instrument of their own leisure?

The key illusion here is that permanence is synonymous with living. This mistake is the result of a flirtatious, un-serious engagement with the prospect of dying; the immediate result of such a flirtation is the understanding that "I will die" and its subsequent fear of death. But where does this leave the living person interested in preserving life in the face of the relentless and unsympathetic passing of time? The living person looks toward the unchanging, the timeless. They look toward those things utterly and entirely indifferent to the passing of time. But this is an inhuman response to a strictly human problem. What object, by virtue of being an object and indifferent to the passing of time, seriously considers its own life? None. Because if the object in question were to contain some kind of biological life, it is still human life alone which has true consciousness of its own finite temporality, its own linear biography jutting out from the endless cycle of (non-human) natural life. Permanence is an inadequate response to human considerations of aging.

So then, how to live, more importantly how to be young? It would seem that action is the only thing; Continued action engaging with others. Speaking, playing, running, fighting, violence if need be, so long as a person's life is made to account for the value of itself outside itself. Life demands a child's curiosity always, a child's indifference to consequence, a child's lack of consideration for risk, all things that throw a person into complex circumstances with other people. All things that, if anything, disregard the point of no return forever placed in our futures. This is a plea to all those who have taken first steps through the iron door of adulthood and with varying responses - mostly complicity - resigned themselves to letting the future's promise of nonexistence become them. Give and take with the living and you embrace life.

You have a choice. Others will know you if you let them. Inflict. Demand. Scour the living for the last vestiges of youth endlessly hidden from view by courtiers who preach deservingness and thieves promising death.