Wear Sunscreen
If I could offer only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it.
Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth. In twenty years, you'll look back at photos of yourself and see how fabulous you really looked. You are not as fat as you imagine.
Don't worry about the future. Or worry, but realize that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubble gum. The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed you worried mind, the kind that blindside you at 4 P.M. on a Tuesday.
Do one thing everyday that scares you.
Sing
Don't be reckless with other people's hearts. Don't put up with people who are reckless with yours.
Floss
Don't waste time on jealousy. Sometimes you're ahead, sometimes you're behind. The race is long and in the end, it's only with yourself.
Remember compliments you receive. Forget the insults. If you succeed in doing this, tell me how.
Keep your old letters. Throw away your old bank statments.
Stretch
Don't feel guilty if you don't know what you want to do with your life. The most interesting people I know didn't know a twenty-one what they wanted to do with their lives. Some of the most <>interesting forty-year-olds I know still don't.
Get plentyof calcium. Be kind to your knees. You'll miss them when they're gone.
Maybe you'll marry, maybe you won't. Maybe you'll have children, maybe you won't. Maybe you'l divorce at forty, maybe you'l dance the funky chicken on your seventy-fifth wedding anniversary. Whatever you do, don't congradulate yourself too much, or berate yourself either. Your choices are half chance. so are everybody else's.
Enjoy your body. Use it every way you can. don't be afraid of it or of what other people think of it. It's the greatest insturment you'll ever own.
Dance, even if you have nowhere to do it but your living room.
Do not read beauty magazines. They will only make you feel ugly.
Get to know your parents. You never know when they'll be gone for good. Be nice to your siblings. They're your best ling to you past and the people most likely to stick with you in the future.
Understand that friends come and go, but with a precious few you should hold on. Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle, because the older you get, the more you need the people who knew you when you were young.
Live in New Yor city once, but leave before it makes you hard. Live in North Carolina once, but leave before it makes you soft.
Travel
Accept certain inalienable trths: Prices will rise. Politicians will philander. You, too, will get old. And when you do, you'll fantasize that when you were young, prices were reasonable, oliticians were noble, and children respected their elders.
Respect your elders
Don't expect anyone else to support you Maybe you have a trust fund. Maybe youll have a wealthy spouse. But you never know when either one might run out.
Don't mess too much with your hair, or by the time you're forty it'll look eighty-five.
Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of notalgia. ispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it's worth.
But trust me on the suscreen...
*Mary Schmich* You may have heard
these lines made into a song.
