More or less as planned?

The new year is a natural time to think about aging and who we are as compared to who we imagined we would be. A friend of mine had a droll observation about this process, writing in a recent email, "as I get older, I realize I'm much more shallow than I originally planned to be."

I think that makes a nice sentence frame:
As I get older, I realize I'm much more (or less) ___ than I planned to be (when I was ____ years old).

I invite you to fill in the blanks anonymously in the comments.

Love and Change

A friend just wrote to me of a "happy yet challenging" relationship she's in. I asked about the challenges and her response was really evocative, so I would like to include a bit of it here:

But right from the start when we first met and talked,
he turned my world upside down, and I am still busy
trying to figure out what "my world" actually is!
- after he turned it upside down... It's like I had my
little world, my views and experiences and everything,
in a little box, nice and orderly, I knew where I could
find my stuff. And he took it, literally turned it
upside down, and now I am figuring out what of the
old stuff I want to keep, what I'd better get rid of,
and what needs modifying.

Isn't this lovely? I think I am taken by it because it is such a vivid image of the confusion and excitement of being alive and being in love, the realization that we are not static or solid, but beings of light and motion--a realization that brings both pain and relief. Hurray for love! Hurray for change!

Maybe the secret to staying in love is in the box too. You can't continually turn someone's box upside down, because that's just annoying, but you can give it a little jostle sometimes or trade items from your boxes--I'll give you this view for that one of yours--and after a while you have so many shared experiences, you can each randomly reach into each other's boxes and pull out familiar but forgotten goodies.

To put it another way, we stay in love because love and change encourage each other.