I fear and envy their faith

Subject: I fear and envy their faith.

I am always struck when I watch interviews with young sports men and women who are on top of their game and talk of their future, that life can be both optimistic and cruel. The optimism of youth, with the fitness and good health that normally accompanies being young, the blind faith in some sort of continuum into the future, the suggestion that their future is a given.
Looking back one remembers those days when anything and everything was possible.
Unfortunately the track record for most people is littered with disappointment peppered with the occasional success, even the stars hide their failures.
"A day to childhood seems a year and years like passing ages". Those  long summer holidays, out of school, let loose in the fields and woods to play and explore were idyllic.
The day stretched out until the evening when we would return home with a scratch or two, a bruise, a limp, but undaunted like heroes returning from the battlefield our parents were fended off with stories fit for adults and their concerns but only vaguely close to the action. Only the day I came in with an arrow sticking out of my head did reality come a little closer as I was rushed off to the nearest hospital to have it pulled out
The travails of life have not blurred the young man's  confidence, the knocks that man is heir to are in the future, lurking in the undergrowth ready just to pop up when you thought you had everything covered. The slights of unrequited love the surety of purpose, not your own purpose but the purpose of others, the devil which was in the detail, when you didn't do detail.
The bumps of injury and illness never factored in your plan, you were imperious to such failings.  The heart beat was strong and the other internal organs hadn't born the brunt of your lifestyle yet.
Clear eyed these athletes exude confidence. Their lust for life is palpable, infectious and for one who has travelled the road, already strangely imbued with the pathos of a black comedy, I both fear and envy their faith.