When it’s hard to smile and harder to cry

So my fellow blogger at Castle of Words articulated a notion I’ve been thinking about lately. The relevant quote I wrote up was “The thing about growing older is that it’s hard to smile and even harder to cry. -AH”, to which a tweep responded with the question if it is possible to slow down the aging process by staying young at heart. But can we? Really?
Every single day adds something new to our lives; whether it is in the form of experiences, people, stories. The cumulative effect of all these sights and sounds may not be able to be measured accurately unless you have access to an fMRI, but it doesn’t take a neuroscientist to figure out our brains get affected by what we encounter every day. Our brains get rewired, our neurons fire away differently, the landscape of our emotional capacity changes as our threshold for feelings such as love, awe, pain, shame shifts.
Sometimes experiences harden us. At other times they soften us and make us more compassionate. The one thing they don’t do is keep us the same. And maybe that’s what they’re supposed to do. Because the 12 year old you wouldn’t have been able to handle the stress the 20 year old you could as a result of all those changes.
Though sometimes I have to admit, it might be worrying that we can’t feel much about an incident. Maybe we’ve learned to rise about the pettiness of things, and not sweat the small stuff. Maybe it’s just our coping mechanism getting an upgrade so when it finally gives an alarm then we know it’s something serious.
I am not sure how much sense this post made. The noise around me is too loud I can barely hear myself think. And to those who wonder how I find time to write; I try to make use of time that would otherwise be wasted. Yes, you guessed it right, I’m stuck in yet another wedding. The samosas just came, let me log off.