Share a lesson you wish you had learned earlier in life.

Great topic, I wrote this a while back and fits this perfectly. Hope you enjoy

The Same Sun

The old man sat on the park bench, his hands resting on a gnarled cane. He watched a single leaf detach from a maple tree and spiral to the ground, its scarlet edges fading to brown. To him, the leaf didn’t fall. It simply remembered a moment when it was full of life, bursting with green, and then it returned to the earth.

A young man named Leo jogged by, his headphones blaring a beat that shook the very air around him. He plopped down on the other end of the bench, pulling out his phone. He swiped and tapped with a furious energy that felt alien to the tranquil afternoon.

“Beautiful day,” the old man said, his voice a soft rustle, like dry leaves.

Leo grunted in response, not looking up from his screen. He saw the old man as a monument to the past, a slow, patient thing. Leo was a creature of the future. He planned his next workout, his next social event, the next thing he would conquer.

The old man, Elara, didn’t mind. He wasn’t in a hurry. He closed his eyes and felt the sun on his face, remembering a different sun, decades ago, on a beach with a girl who tasted of salt and coconut. He remembered the sun that had baked the asphalt on the day his daughter was born, and the low, winter sun that had cast long shadows on his father’s funeral. The same sun, a thousand different moments.

Leo sighed loudly, frustrated by a notification. “The internet’s so slow out here.”

Elara opened his eyes, a gentle smile on his lips. “I used to think life was a race,” he said. “A constant climb toward the next thing. You get a job, a family, a house. But that’s just the first half of the story.”

Leo finally looked at him, an eyebrow raised. “Everyone knows that,” he said. “Everyone’s been young. You get through it, you get older, you get to here.” He gestured to the park, to the old man, to the slowing afternoon light.

Elara’s smile softened into something thoughtful. “Everyone has been young, yes. It is the one great, shared experience. We all know the frantic energy, the broken hearts, the feeling that time stretches out forever. It’s a road we all walk for a little while.”

He paused, adjusting his position on the bench. “But not everyone has been older.”

Leo’s brow furrowed. He hadn’t thought about it like that. He saw old age as an inevitable endpoint, a final stage. He never considered it as a unique state of being.

“Youth is a common language,” Elara continued. “But to be old is to speak a private one. It’s to carry all those past versions of yourself with you, to see them, to feel them. I am not just this old man. I am also the boy on the beach, the young father, the man with the broken heart. They are all right here, under the same skin. They don’t exist in a memory; they exist in me.”

He looked at Leo with eyes that seemed to hold a vast and unimaginable depth. “You can imagine what it’s like to be young, even though you are young. But you cannot imagine what it is like to have lived a thousand lives under the same sun.”

Leo felt a chill. He looked down at his hands, at the future he was so desperately trying to grasp, and for the first time, he felt the weight of the past. He saw his youth not as a destination, but as a fleeting moment on a road that only a lucky few get to walk all the way to the end.

~Tim