...said Robert Browning. Never think your best years are behind you.
An old post:
“Becoming adult” is our next chapter in Why Grow Up…
Stephen Law tweets: “I’m 60. Yet I don’t feel that I am a ‘grown up’, and feel I would be fraud if a pretended to be one (I do know how to *act* like a ‘grown up’).”
To which I say: just wait four years.
A student asked the other day, in response to my approving citation of Susan Neiman’s statement that it’s a mistake to think the best years are between 16 and 26 (or 18 and 28?): What is the best? Sixty-four, I said. Next year I’ll say sixty-five. When I stop updating my answer, you’ll know my time is past. Not dead yet.
But while I’m here, I’ll still keep on trying to think for myself. That’s Kant’s definition of maturity. Are we there yet?
Education, travel, and work at their best all “undercut the dogmatism of the worldviews into which we are born.” That’s the project of a lifetime. Not learning, not going, not finding something valuable to do with your time all block it. Sadly, many are blocked early and never get going. Many get stuck replicating the choices and limited opportunities demonstrated by their parents. But “if you don’t reject any of their choices you are not grown-up.” And if you won the parent-lottery, you’ll find plenty of their choices to have been spot-on. Not all, though.
Learn some languages and learn to love music early on, is something I wish the adults in my life had been more insistent about. They gave me a good model of fluent English, and bought me a piano and lessons. But I wanted to play ball during lesson-time. Coulda done both, with the right cajoling… 11.1.21
In a way I agree, I don't think that after you leave behind your youth the fun days stop happening. I just think some people fail to make the best of their older days and spend it constantly missing their youth. For me personally I cannot wait to be older, its what ive been working on all this time to make it amazing.
ReplyDelete