What’s the best advice you’d give to someone younger than you?
The first answer that popped into my head when I saw this question today was…wear sunscreen. Come on millennials and maybe Gen X, don’t let me down, you do know why I thought of that, right?
Because of this catchy song that was out in 1999. From what I remember, these were the words of a columnist in Chicago who wrote a hypothetical graduation speech. It caught on and Baz Luhrmann set it to music. I mean, it’s actually good advice. At 44 years old, I’ve got sun spots on my face from being out in the sun without sunscreen, so…yes, good advice.
There was even a book, that I actually have, that is a little picture book with the words in it.
The book, Google tells me, is by the columnist who originally published the “speech”. Which is good, I’m glad she was able to make a profit off of it. Though, I’m assuming she had to have been paid for them to use her words in the song.
Anyway, my advice is equally simple. Use the stickers. Lots of people remember being a kid and collecting stickers but being too afraid to use them up or regret sticking them somewhere so they never used them. Same thing with candles. Burn the candles. Even the nice, pretty ones. I have started doing this. I’m not really a candle person, but I am a sticker person. I have a subscription to a monthly sticker club. In fact, I just got this month’s shipment yesterday. While there are more stickers than I can reasonably use up, I have been using them. Life is too short to hoard the stickers. Don’t die with a box full of sticker sheets that still have all the stickers. Use them! Decorate your life and the lives of others. I do my best to send stickers to people and to decorate my own stuff. The case of my laptop has no space left for all the stickers. In fact, I’m taking home this little notebook I have at work today so that I can add some sticker whimsy to it.
For my knitting friends, same advice applies to yarn. Use the good stuff! In my online knitting swap group, we have yarn that we call CDH. As in, you can have this yarn if you can pry it from my Cold Dead Hands. That means it’s yarn that we will absolutely not swap or sell. But it also means we are hesitant to use it because it’s too pretty or too soft or too something. But we really need to stop that. It takes time though to feel comfortable doing that. I have a ball of qiviut yarn that is 100% musk ox fiber. It was $90 for a teeny tiny little ball of it. But Josh got it for me for Christmas one year because it was a knitting bucket list thing for me. It’s so expensive because of how rare it is and people pay that price because of how soft it is. I just wanted to touch it. It’s not really sold in stores. I have now touched it. But I am terrified to knit with it. I’ll take my own advice at some point. I refuse to die without having made something with it.
So…bottom line, use the good stuff. Whether it’s stickers, the nice candles, the pretty tablecloth, whatever it is. Life is too short to not enjoy what we have. Also, do wear sunscreen. It’s kind of important.
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