Numbers.

The bigger it gets, the less you look forward to it.

Remember when you're 6 years old and you look forward to your birthday for weeks? Months even. It's like it can't come fast enough. You repeatedly ask your Mum how many more days. Tell your Father incessantly what your plans are for the day. How you're going to have the biggest cake, eat the most food, play the coolest games. How all your friends will come around and those 3 hours when you're all together will be fun and action packed and adventurous. Your birthday was the best day, filled with excitement and joy.

Well, it used to be.

Then those numbers turned to double digits, you left your teens and the prospect of starting your age with 'twenty something' seemed like the start of a downhill track. As if the 20's slide into 40's before you even have a chance to enjoy the view, feel the moment and live the right now.

The beauty of the early digits is not in the small numbers, but in our unyielding ability to appreciate the moment. Our innocence, our naivety perhaps, allowed us to feel the thrill of the current pursuit, to know that the most important time is the current. Place yourselves in the shoes of your six year old self for a second, those bright, glittery ones, or the ones that had compasses on them, or even those multi coloured ones that kind of looked like bowling shoes. Place yourself in the time when birthday parties seemed to last all day, where so much happened and when your parents came to pick you up there was so much to tell. Remember that these parties mostly lasted two to three hours, but every single moment you thought about the moment you were living. You enjoyed the taste of the cake, the thrill of the chase in tag, the suspense of opening the presents and the constant chatter and giggling of being surrounded by your favourite friends.

You didn't think about next week's rent or the essay that needed to be handed in. You didn't think about the boyfriend who might be cheating on you or the flatmate that never cleaned. You didn't think past the hour, let alone past the day. You knew that now was good.

The moment makes the memory. And everything becomes a memory. We have no control over that. It has already been decided, prescribed and layed out, unchangeable. What we can control is the memory itself. We all want good ones. The memories like those 6 year old birthday parties.

We may have more to worry about as we grow older, I'm certainly not advising you skip out on rent, dump your boyfriend, drop out of school and quit your job in an attempt to make friends with 6 year olds and attempt to fit into those tiny ball pits and miniature playgrounds. But every moment can be lived, regardless of the number that society deems to define you.

Youth shouldn't define the way you live. A number shouldn't tell us how we should be, look or behave. Every day is another series of moments to be lived. Every day we get to choose what we store in that memory bank and every day we should take a little a bit of our 6 six year old self with us. That live in the moment, appreciate the now, nonchalant kind of mentality. That way the next birthday will roll around and you'll look back on the year that's passed and think about how long it felt, and how much you did, and how many moments you really lived.

You certainly can't stop the numbers climbing up, many a celebrity has attempted to physically reverse the inevitable and has merely ended up with less money in the bank and a better relationship with their surgeon. But you can decide whether that rising number really defines you, or whether you'll live like Abraham Lincoln where "it's not the years in your life that counts. It's the life in your years."