LIne from the movie "The Breakfast Club"(1985)

I was listening to Molly Ringwald who was in "The Breakfast Club" recently on a Talk show late at night and decided I might like to watch "The Breakfast Club" again. I found myself unable to sleep and up sort of late and it was on an HBO Channel in Santa Barbara and I heard this line:

"When you grow up your heart dies!"

And I had to think about this a little.

I don't think it's so much that your heart dies it's more that you have to be very resourceful to survive your life.

It's never like you thought it would be.

Even if you knew who you wanted to be an went to college to become that it isn't what you thought it would be.

So, it's not so much that your heart dies. It's more that life is never what we expect. So, on one level a person cannot help but be disappointed in life in some ways.

I remember my parents telling me honestly (because they believed this in the 1950s) "YOU can be ANYTHING you want to be!"

And more than anything else this just really confused me and gave me too many choices from my point of view.

Then I later met people in Asia who had lived in the same house as their relatives for 1000 or 2000 years and had done exactly the same thing as their ancestors had done for 1000 or 2000 years and I saw how different western culture is from that.

So, what does it really mean: "When you Grow up your heart dies!"

I think it means "Unless you are really adaptable your broken heart is going to get you dead."

This is what it means to me.

I learned to become and opportunist in my life. To take the opportunities that life gave me and make something of these opportunities.

I often look around me at people who didn't do this and often they are dead or worse now.

So, from my point of view it isn't that your heart dies. It's more like "If you aren't extremely adaptable you won't even make it to 20 or 30 years of age.

So, my thought is that "If you don't learn to be adaptable you aren't going to survive anyway!

So, it's not so much that your heart dies, if you aren't careful you will die young too.

It's about survival in the end.

So, being kind to yourself and others as much as possible and still surviving keeps your heart alive to old age.

"And you can survive to 105 if you're young at heart"-Sinatra in one of his songs.