Reflection: With Age Comes Wisdom

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I’m beginning to understand why we gain and lose patience as we get older.

In our youth we are full or awe and wonderment. Life is shiny. Life is waiting for us to come along and experience, savor, enjoy, learn, and grow. We’re new. It’s new. A true wonderment to behold.

As we go through life we lose our innocence. A little here, some more over there. It’s different for everyone. It’s similar, too. It may happen early such as the loss of a loved one or an abusive environment. How old were you when you realized the toothfairy was not real?

Experiences grow and more of the shininess dulls away. We start to think we actually know something. In some cases we do; in most we’re still grossly uninformed. If we’re lucky we struggle a bit and learn a little something about ourselves and not just the world we live in. Oh, yes, struggle is good and the earlier (teens, twenties) it happens, the better as far as I’m concerned.

More growth, more life, more dulling, and yet we start to polish, too.

The luckiest among us learn tolerance; empathy. And we teach others; we teach our children (all children). Different is just different, not better or worse. Differences should be embraced. We have much to learn from those differences.

Turning a deaf ear.

Everyone has an opinion. You know what they say about opinions, don’t you? Well, I do and I remember this whenever I start to spout off my own. Neither right nor wrong, an opinion is just an opinion. It is not fact.

Knowing when to keep opinions to oneself is a benefit of experience. Dwayne always says something about a fool and not knowing when to be quiet. I can never remember the words, but I always remember the spirit. If we’re always talking and never listening, then we are not learning.

And yet, sometimes we need to tune out all the noise and just let it go. It doesn’t affect my day to day life whether or not Ashton Kutcher, Jesse James, or anyone else cheated on their wife or vice versa. Do we secretly wish bad things on those who seem to have more?

The backslide

And the tipping point comes sometime after we’ve learned what we’ve learned and no longer wish to learn anything more. We grow even older. Sometimes we get crotchety. Almost assuredly we get opinionated without apology. And we expect everyone to get the hell out of our way when we’re driving down the road.

And they say ignorance is bliss.

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