Seven years

Some say life is a succession of seven-year periods, each of them defining a different stage in your life. I guess that could be true to some extent. I spent the first seven years of my life in Rotterdam, after which my family and I moved to a small and quiet town, a major change for all of us. During the next seven years I went from elementary to grammar school, changed from a girl who had a single best friend into someone who actually belonged to a clique. Nothing particularly great happened when I became fourteen and entered the next 'stage', although over the next few years I gradually became your typical teenage poet lamenting the agony of everyday life and the uselessness of it all. And then I fell in love, life became brighter (although the colour of my clothes did not), I graduated and went to college, moved out of my parent's house, learned many things, met new people... It just seems silly to consider these events which took place during seven years to belong to a single stage in life. Maybe this theory does not work out so well for me after all. But say it does, that would mean I have just started the fourth seven-year stage of my life. Nothing special happened to mark the transition from the previous period into this one though. People are probably supposed to become grown-ups during these seven years; finish their studies, get a job, get a car, maybe get married, maybe have kids (eek!). Hmmm... For now, I think I'll just try to do the first and worry about the rest later. Maybe in the next seven years.