MORE WISDOM

163 – Friday, June 12, 2009

Blog 161 addressed some youthful wisdom emanating from our son when he was a lad which struck a note with a few of my readers. As I answered some email that shared enthusiasm for the progeny’s poignant perspective, I was struck with another query he posed to me several years after the one that was the subject of my blog. The occasion was after one of those man-to-man conversations that surrounded a philosophical and ethereal discussion of the origins of the universe or some other similar deep subject that you never approach on purpose, rather they just spawn themselves out of one of those answers-to-questions-that-were-never-actually-asked times – you probably know exactly what I am talking about if you have had pre-teens of your own. At the end of our ‘breakthrough’, Ben turned to me an asked, “Dad, why is wisdom always wasted on old people?” I would have been about forty-two or forty-three and was suddenly mortified to think that my son saw me as an ‘old people’, but the sad truth became instantly apparent. My answer to him was as accurate as I had discovered only a few years before, “Wisdom is not ‘wasted’ on older people, it is invested in them – the only problem is that when the old folks offer to share it with the younger ones, they usually don’t want to hear it from them.” Was I right?

This blog is posted on: http://www.rlarrison.blogspot.com/ http://www.myspace.com/rlarrison http://www.linkedin.com/in/rlarrison