What Was Gained, What Was Lost

Ageing

Mohamedarif Mohamed Suleman (Dar es Salaam, Tanzania) is a digital marketing specialist and an Educator-cum-Trainer. He has involved himself in community organisations and matters from a young age, and through his writings, continues to speak of social and cultural reform to this day. He is also the founding moderator of this forum.

Between the hopes of youth and the nostalgia of old age lies the winding corridor of human experience. It is a place not marked by clear milestones, but by subtle shifts – moments barely noticed at the time, yet monumental in hindsight. Between strength and weakness, between fullness and hollowness, the story of a life unfolds, asking a question both haunting and humbling: what was gained, and what was lost?

In youth, we gain possibility. Our days are elastic, stretched wide with potential. We gain the ability to imagine without restraint, to act without fear of finality. The body is strong, the mind unburdened. Even our failures feel like stepping stones, not barriers. We gather dreams, friendships, and firsts. We collect beginnings, unaware of their true value.

When we are young, the world seems infinitely expansive. Every morning, the sun appears to rise for us, casting a golden promise upon the horizon. We are charged with dreams, steeped in conviction, and propelled by the intoxicating belief that change is not only possible – it is inevitable, and we are its agents. In our youthful innocence or arrogance, we envision a future free of contradiction, where goodness triumphs, justice is delivered, and we stand as its bearers. We are ready to challenge everything – systems, norms, even our limits.

With such fire, we become role models – not necessarily for what we have achieved but for the purity of our striving. Our words are laced with courage, our actions tinted with purpose. In our zeal to do good, we often forget the complexity of life, the shades of grey that colour every black-and-white ideal we once held dear. But we go on, ever upward, convinced that we are building a path not just for ourselves but for others who will come after.

Yet time, silent, steady, unrelenting, moves us forward. The years bring with them experiences that deepen and distort us. They challenge our idealism with the stubbornness of reality. Some of our dreams break upon contact with the world’s indifference. Others evolve, weathered by compromise, fatigue, or quiet disillusionment.

And then, at the threshold of old age, we look back. What once felt like a smooth arc toward success and righteousness reveals itself to be a jagged trail, littered with both victories and regrets, noble moments and unintended consequences. The role model of youth meets the introspective elder, and they do not always shake hands.

And yes, we lose too, often unknowingly. We lose the depth that comes from enduring. We lack the patience born of repeated attempts, the discernment that comes only through wear. We may lose relationships by moving too quickly, or values by clinging too tightly to certainty. In chasing everything, we sometimes overlook the quiet, enduring things that matter most.

We lose the strength we once took for granted, the ease of recovery, the natural optimism that once buoyed us. We lose people, and places, and sometimes pieces of ourselves. The fullness of youthful energy may give way to the hollowness of what might have been. The certainty of our twenties dissolves into the questions of our sixties and beyond.

We may still be admired, perhaps more than ever, for our wisdom, experience, and endurance. But within, there may be a quieter story – of battles we lost within ourselves, of ideals we shelved for convenience or survival, of decisions we made in haste or silence that echo louder in the stillness of later years.

This is not failure, but truth. Ageing does not always bring peace; it brings clarity. The nostalgia we feel is often less about yearning for youth itself and more about mourning the certainty we once carried. And the despair? It is not always because we have lived poorly, but because we finally understand the cost of living earnestly.

Yet, even amidst the rubble of missteps, there remains something luminous. If youth offers vision, old age offers perspective. If youth dares to begin the journey, age knows how to read the map, including the parts we drew wrong. And perhaps that, too, is a kind of hope, not in perfection, but in presence; not in legacy without flaw, but in a life that dared to strive, stumble, and still move forward.

Old age, for all its losses, brings its gains. We gather understanding – sometimes heavy, sometimes redemptive. We gain the capacity to look at life not as a ladder to climb but as a landscape to appreciate. We gain stories, scars, and softness. The things we once ran from – ambiguity, vulnerability, mortality – become companions rather than threats.

And yet, in this balance, this mysterious accounting of gain and loss, there may be something richer than triumph. There is perspective. There is depth. There is the bittersweet realisation that the best parts of life are often inseparable from its pain. That love and grief grow from the same root. That beauty and impermanence are not opposites, but twins.

Between youth and old age lies not just a measure of time, but of becoming. We are not the same selves at either end – and perhaps we were never meant to be. What we gain is not always what we sought. What we lose is not always what we feared. And between the two, we live – messily, bravely, incompletely, beautifully.

In the end, the question is not whether we won or lost, but whether we lived fully enough to hold both hope and regret in the same hand – and still reach forward. So let youth dream, and let age remember. Let both carry the torch, not in succession but in conversation – each lending to the other what the other lacks: the fire of the beginning, and the wisdom of the end.

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