OLD and WISE
Friday, May 1, 2020
As children, we look up to our parents to guide us, then teachers. As grownups, we look up to our bosses, our spouses, and then leaders of our country?
At very few points along this journey, do we pause to look to our elders – to our grandparents, to our mentors, to philosophers, to good books, and to well-recorded history?
We simply don’t find them knowing anything more, better, or wiser than what we know.
I remember this well.
Now that I am in that ‘older’ category, I realize what old people have always known, and young people have failed forever to appreciate – that the wisdom doesn’t come so much from superior knowledge or experience, but from perspective.
Right now, the most unsettled group in our society are old people, a club of which I’m becoming a member – realizing that we have just had our runway shortened, our personal situation and lifestyle altered. For many people all over the world, the next few years (3-10 yrs.) will be altered beyond measure. This is a health crisis with a mountainous mess of economic and social impact piled on top.
There is no silver lining yet, no silver bullet, just more hair growing out of place hair should not grow – and nobody is open to cut it. Reopening the economy of any country is not a solution to this or a cure for a disease.
The real disease here is not COVID-19, but rather ‘how we are organized as a world.’
The real problem here is not when we recover, but if we recover?
The real truth here is that the earth every human is interconnected and interdependent as never in history – and while we could tout it as wonderful that medical science, engineering, government, and the economy are proving one of Newton’s laws: for each and every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
Truth. Facts. Fear. Ambition. Survival.
One might wonder what Charles Darwin might say if he woke up in the middle of all this; I know, he’d need to study it for 25 years first, do a dozen other things, and then come to a conclusion.
We don’t have decades or centuries of data, we don’t have studies of alternative treatments that have failed, each marginally better than the last, but in the fullness of time, best practices will emerge. They always do – and in the learning, it is discovered that many simpler things done sooner and universally were the trick, and we’ll also likely discover that solutions many scrambled to provide were far less useful than before.
While it is true, that time is all mankind ever had, nobody has learned how to turn-back a sundial – nobody can reverse anything, delay anything, or fix anything.
Attitude matters.
But what matters most, or least?
Who matters most, or least?
What we don’t have is time. While the world has billions of years ahead, we all have limited time, so what can we do to use it better, waste less of it, and get to the point. The more we are direct, transparent, and disclose our motive, we are most likely to waste less time getting to the point, to the goal, to the place of having wisdom anyone might want to share.
Reader feedback:
Things I can live without: daily use of my car, game face, and constantly checking my damn phone. All of which have dropped away during this crisis. Good riddance, JB, Edmonton, AB
This isolation period has taken a toll in all of us who have given it a serious thought. We will find a modified way of "safe" coexistence, for now we can only try to rest, order our priorities and be ready for the quarantine to be lifted. It is scariest for us in the 5th floor, we now know with certainty that health system will fail us in our winter years. Do take care, AG, Cancun, Mex.
Thanks for stopping by yesterday. I went for a mid afternoon run through the deserted streets of downtown Canmore. It made me sad, RH, Calgary/Canmore, AB
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