“Youth is wasted on the young” 1 is a phrase you will one day understand, but only too late. You will wrinkle and gray, but know that youth is given in fair trade2 for the wisdom you earn over time.
Be someone who makes you happy. Don’t take yourself so seriously. You are your own worst critic and only you have to live with your decisions. Life is far more flexible than you imagine.
The world is just one big small town. Treat its residents accordingly. Serve your community selflessly and it will repay in kind. Your youth, friends, lovers, coworkers and neighbors all come and go. Family will bind you to your ancestry and is the only thing that survives you. You are the microphone of your ancestors.
Forgive your parents; they were young once, too. Where they failed, do not6. Raise children intelligently, you owe it to your grandparents.
Teach your daughters to be warriors and your sons to be artists. They will find their own path when the time comes. Love them regardless.
True friends will offer a lift when you’re stranded or a sofa for the night. Don’t overstay your welcome. Offer your own sofa. Build yourself an army so you have ground to go to.
Ask for advice from your elders. The best is offered free of charge. Take what you need and make a list. Change it whenever you change yourself15,16 and 17. When you are old, offer advice to any open ears. Some may forget it, others may ignore it, but a handful may take your best lines and repeat them in ages and ages hence.
The past is unchangeable, the future is unknowable18. You live in the moment between them19. Glory is fleeting but obscurity is forever. Become worth remembering.
Christopher Fox Graham
Managing Editor
1: From the French proverb, “Si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse pouvait”
2: Paraphrased from Frank Miller’s comic book “Sin City,” in which the dying Detective John Hartigan says of Nancy Callahan “An old man dies, a little girl lives. Fair trade.”
5: “… the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars,” Jack Kerouac, from “On the Road.”
6: “All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does, and that is his,” Oscar Wilde, from “The Importance of Being Ernest”
7: “I have no desire to prove anything by it. I have never used it as an outlet or a means of expressing myself. I just dance,” Fred Astaire, from “Steps in Time”.
9: On March 13, 1964, 28-year-old Kitty Genovese was stabbed to death in Kew Gardens, Queens, New York. Despite 37 witnesses, no one called police, assuming someone else had. The New York Times condemned the witnesses in an editorial for their indifference to her murder.
10: From Flagstaff slam poet Jackson Morris, now teaching English in mainland China
11: From Sedona slam poet Evan Dissinger
12: From Flagstaff slam poet Ryan Brown, now teaching English in South Korea
18: In special and general relativity, a light cone is the path that a flash of light, emanating from a single event (localized to a single point in space and a single moment in time) and traveling in all directions, would take through spacetime. If one imagines the light confined to a two-dimensional plane, the light from the flash spreads out in a circle after the event E occurs, and if we graph the growing circle with the vertical axis of the graph representing time, the result is a cone, known as the future light cone. The past light cone behaves like the future light cone in reverse, a circle which contracts in radius at the speed of light until it converges to a point at the exact position and time of the event E. In reality, there are three space dimensions, so the light would actually form an expanding or contracting sphere in three-dimensional (3D) space rather than a circle in 2D, and the light cone would actually be a four-dimensional version of a cone whose cross-sections form 3D spheres (analogous to a normal three-dimensional cone whose cross-sections form 2D circles), but the concept is easier to visualize with the number of spatial dimensions reduced from three to two.
“Youth is wasted on the young” 1 is a phrase you will one day understand, but only too late. You will wrinkle and gray, but know that youth is given in fair trade2 for the wisdom you earn over time.
Be someone who makes you happy. Don’t take yourself so seriously. You are your own worst critic and only you have to live with your decisions. Life is far more flexible than you imagine.
The world is just one big small town. Treat its residents accordingly. Serve your community selflessly and it will repay in kind. Your youth, friends, lovers, coworkers and neighbors all come and go. Family will bind you to your ancestry and is the only thing that survives you. You are the microphone of your ancestors.
Forgive your parents; they were young once, too. Where they failed, do not6. Raise children intelligently, you owe it to your grandparents.
Teach your daughters to be warriors and your sons to be artists. They will find their own path when the time comes. Love them regardless.
True friends will offer a lift when you’re stranded or a sofa for the night. Don’t overstay your welcome. Offer your own sofa. Build yourself an army so you have ground to go to.
Ask for advice from your elders. The best is offered free of charge. Take what you need and make a list. Change it whenever you change yourself15,16 and 17. When you are old, offer advice to any open ears. Some may forget it, others may ignore it, but a handful may take your best lines and repeat them in ages and ages hence.
The past is unchangeable, the future is unknowable18. You live in the moment between them19. Glory is fleeting but obscurity is forever. Become worth remembering.
Christopher Fox Graham
Managing Editor
1: From the French proverb, “Si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse pouvait”
2: Paraphrased from Frank Miller’s comic book “Sin City,” in which the dying Detective John Hartigan says of Nancy Callahan “An old man dies, a little girl lives. Fair trade.”
5: “… the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars,” Jack Kerouac, from “On the Road.”
6: “All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does, and that is his,” Oscar Wilde, from “The Importance of Being Ernest”
7: “I have no desire to prove anything by it. I have never used it as an outlet or a means of expressing myself. I just dance,” Fred Astaire, from “Steps in Time”.
9: On March 13, 1964, 28-year-old Kitty Genovese was stabbed to death in Kew Gardens, Queens, New York. Despite 37 witnesses, no one called police, assuming someone else had. The New York Times condemned the witnesses in an editorial for their indifference to her murder.
10: From Flagstaff slam poet Jackson Morris, now teaching English in mainland China
11: From Sedona slam poet Evan Dissinger
12: From Flagstaff slam poet Ryan Brown, now teaching English in South Korea
18: In special and general relativity, a light cone is the path that a flash of light, emanating from a single event (localized to a single point in space and a single moment in time) and traveling in all directions, would take through spacetime. If one imagines the light confined to a two-dimensional plane, the light from the flash spreads out in a circle after the event E occurs, and if we graph the growing circle with the vertical axis of the graph representing time, the result is a cone, known as the future light cone. The past light cone behaves like the future light cone in reverse, a circle which contracts in radius at the speed of light until it converges to a point at the exact position and time of the event E. In reality, there are three space dimensions, so the light would actually form an expanding or contracting sphere in three-dimensional (3D) space rather than a circle in 2D, and the light cone would actually be a four-dimensional version of a cone whose cross-sections form 3D spheres (analogous to a normal three-dimensional cone whose cross-sections form 2D circles), but the concept is easier to visualize with the number of spatial dimensions reduced from three to two.
Christopher Fox Graham is the managing editor of the Sedona Rock Rocks News, The Camp Verde Journal and the Cottonwood Journal Extra. Hired by Larson Newspapers as a copy editor in 2004, he became assistant manager editor in October 2009 and managing editor in August 2013. Graham has won awards for editorials, investigative news reporting, headline writing, page design and community service from the Arizona Newspapers Association. Graham has also been featured in Editor & Publisher magazine. He lectures on journalism and First Amendment law and is a nationally recognized performance aka slam poet. Retired U.S. Army Col. John Mills, former director of Cybersecurity Policy, Strategy, and International Affairs referred to him as "Mr. Slam Poet."
Dance7. Your body is a gift that took billions of years to create. Use it unabashedly and unshamefully. If you are reading this, you are beautiful. Nothing is wrong with you8.
In special and general relativity, a light cone is the path that a flash of light, emanating from a single event (localized to a single point in space and a single moment in time) and traveling in all directions, would take through spacetime. If one imagines the light confined to a two-dimensional plane, the light from the flash spreads out in a circle after the event E occurs, and if we graph the growing circle with the vertical axis of the graph representing time, the result is a cone, known as the future light cone. The past light cone behaves like the future light cone in reverse, a circle which contracts in radius at the speed of light until it converges to a point at the exact position and time of the event E. In reality, there are three space dimensions, so the light would actually form an expanding or contracting sphere in three-dimensional (3D) space rather than a circle in 2D, and the light cone would actually be a four-dimensional version of a cone whose cross-sections form 3D spheres (analogous to a normal three-dimensional cone whose cross-sections form 2D circles), but the concept is easier to visualize with the number of spatial dimensions reduced from three to two.
