How Many Lives Have You Lived?

Everyone says we have just one life that we should live to the full, and we should.

Recently, I had a conversation about childhood. I used to be best friends with this person’s brother, and he also had a best friend that hung around with us,or maybe I hung around with them. Two boys, and me. We were eight. We would charge around on our bikes and spend time playing in each other’s back gardens.

It caused me to think of how it felt like lifetime ago, in fact, a whole other life. We live our lives in segments, and don’t always realise until we move on to the next stage.

For me, I think about being a child, being part of a family with siblings, then later, a mother, and finally now a grandmother. We can all section our lives off in different ways. It causes us to reflect back with memories of each one. Some are good, some not so much. We all live and grow through the paths we take.

It made me to think about William Shakespeare and his seven stages of life.

1. Infancy
2. Schoolboy
3. Teenager
4. Young man
5. Middle-aged
6. Old aged
7. Dotage & death

Taken from the strange-sounding named website called nosweatshakespear.com:

Ages of Man Monologue in Full

Below is the complete ‘ages of man’ monologue from As You Like It – one of Shakespeare’s most famous and well-liked passages:

‘All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players.
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.
Then, the whining school-boy with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like a snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then, a soldier,
Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden, and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then, the justice,
In fair round belly, with a good capon lin’d,
With eyes severe, and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws, and modern instances,
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
His youthful hose, well sav’d, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.