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Some of us humans seem incapable of making up our minds about what we want out of life. To some of us the grass is always greener on the other side, including the side they just left.

I remember when I was 11 years old, I used to see these older guys driving around in their 'souped-up' cars and powerful Kawasaki motorcycles and I wished I was older. These guys used to hang out near an ice-cream parlour in Mandeville with the prettiest girls. The girls would be clinging to them like they couldn't so much as take a single step without them. I used to sit on a wall next to the Odeon cinema licking the sprinkles off my ice cream while secretly wishing I was 18 or 20. I couldn't wait to grow up.

This is not to say childhood was horrible. It was a lot of fun. My friends and I used to get up to all kinds of mischief. The things we came up with, only kids our age could, and still do, for that matter, but to many of us, especially me, what I saw the older guys doing was just so much cooler.

However, as time raced by and I became the 20-year-old with the girls, I found that while it was cool to have the girls around, they came at a great personal sacrifice. Having a girlfriend could be a royal pain. They always wanted to do something when you wanted to do something else and if you didn't do what they wanted you to do, you wouldn't hear the end of it.

Some of those times I wished I was young again, too young to worry about girls.

But wanting to be on the 'greener' side goes well beyond that. When you are young, your naïve little mind doesn't understand that responsibilities come with being an adult. When you are a kid, you don't think about bills, rent, mortgage, women, careers, or pensions. Those realities have very little meaning for you, and anybody who brought those things up was considered really old and boring.

That is, until you got there. That is when it gets worse. That is the time when careers take over and wives rule your life and the bank owns your cheque book and your kids control your wallet. That's when you start to wish you didn't have to grow up.

There is something else that you cherish when you're young that you grow to hate when you grow up: your mirror. As a youngster, you could never get enough of seeing you. For me, my mirror was my best friend. Back then, before the age of cell phones, my mirror was my 'selfie'.

Now, when I look in the mirror, I don't even recognise me anymore. My innocent eyes have given way to tired eyes, and my afro is no more. My 'cute' dimple is now lost in my sagging jowls. As I looked into the mirror one day this week, I can empathise with Bruce Jenner. Most people these days know Jenner as the beleaguered husband of Kris, on Keeping up with the Kardashians. I know him as the American who introduced me to the decathlon when he won gold at the Olympics in Montreal in 1976.

In recent times, Jenner has been going through a series of physical changes that I believe are an attempt to hold on to his youth for as long as possible. In the past couple of years, Jenner has had a facelift and just recently, he had shaved his Adam's apple and is doing stuff with his hair, stuff that he thinks make him look younger. I empathise with his attempts to clutch desperately to the dying embers of his youth because these days, I think I understand the place where his mind now resides.

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