I suppose I should be more upset about it. Turning 48. Yep, that\u2019s what I\u2019m about to do. Don\u2019t have much say in the matter. Father time doesn\u2019t exactly ask if you want to go sky diving. He just throws you out the plane door whether you\u2019re ready or not. \u201cDon\u2019t forget to pull the ripcord!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cRIPCORD!?! Nobody said anything about a \u2018ripcord?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
SPLATTT!!!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I guess my philosophy is you can\u2019t get too upset over something you have no control over. Ate a whole cake? You did that. Had a mid-life crisis and bought an alpaca? Well, you should have been a normal person and bought an expensive sports car you don\u2019t know how to drive or got a tattoo that says: \u201cCouldn\u2019t think of anything better.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Turning a year older is the one thing in life out of your hands, so why get bothered by it? Why rue it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Besides, I thought understood it. There was supposed to be a nice tradeoff: \u201cWith age comes wisdom,\u201d the old adage goes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As I tick-tick-tick toward 50, it isn\u2019t my age that\u2019s been bothering me. I\u2019m still running fairly well, there have been no full-sized slabs of bacon discovered in my arteries and my hair is mostly its original black, primarily due to the fact that Florida summers charred it to a crisp long ago. While there\u2019s the makings of a speed bump on my waist, for now it hasn\u2019t forced any drastic action on the belt loop front.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But as I start to reach these upper ages, I\u2019m seriously wondering about this whole wisdom thing. Because I sure thought it would be coming down in a steady trickle by now. Filling my cup. Teaching me things that my younger self couldn\u2019t dream of. Like how to ask for directions and not feel dumb. (Especially after I get them wrong and drive the car into a lake.) Or to not eat spaghetti sauce when wearing a white shirt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Here I am hovering where the oxygen is thin and they hand out reading glasses by the 50-gallon drum, but I don\u2019t feel any smarter. Certainly not wiser.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\u2019m starting to feel more than a little ripped off.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Where\u2019s my wisdom? Where\u2019s my intelligence? Where is me smarts?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In a search for the answer, I decided to Google: \u201cGetting old so when does the wisdom train arrive?\u201d In addition to ads for adult diapers and articles on stocks that if I had bought decades ago would have made me richer than the Sultan of Brunei\u2019s gardener, I stumbled upon an entry in The Journals of Gerontology that began: \u201cIt is often assumed colloquially that wisdom comes with age and experience, yet empirically and anecdotally this is not necessarily the case.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Uh \u2026 what?!? And to further prove the article\u2019s point, I couldn\u2019t understand any of what it had to say.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Which just made me furious. My frustration with turning 48 was growing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I WANT TO BE WISE!!!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
All my life, I thought these would be the years when it all started to add up. To make sense. To click. When answers to age-old questions would be at my grasp, and great knowledge that had always evaded me would appear in a color-coded manual called, \u201cStuff they didn\u2019t teach you in grade school \u2026 because you were dangerous and probably would burn something down.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It would just show up one day. Maybe I would be visited by The Great Fairy of Wisdom. I pictured an old man with a gray beard, a cardigan and a slide-rule for a wand. \u201cSonny, let ye be smart!\u201d he would proclaim, and with a flash of light and a scent of mothballs, all of life\u2019s secrets would awaken in me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cOh my gosh!\u201d I would say in wonder at the revelations. \u201cThat\u2019s how to properly cook steel cut oatmeal.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Wisdom – The quality of having experience, knowledge, and good judgment; of being wise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That would be me!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I would finally have it all figured out. I would suddenly know what I was doing. Everything I\u2019ve ever struggled with would instantly make sense. There would be some grand reason, or meaning behind it, and I would have the WISDOM to understand it. To reflect upon it. To move on. Because I was wise and enlightened, and my stock gains would be so huge I could pay someone else to worry about problems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There are so many things I thought I would know by now. For starters, how to talk and act like an adult.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But as 48 approaches, I feel like I\u2019m getting the wisdom shaft!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Or maybe I\u2019ve got it all wrong. Maybe \u201cwisdom\u201d is something else I\u2019m just not grasping. Not a miraculous epiphany, but a realization that it\u2019s time to stop worrying so much about finding it. Time to realize I\u2019ll never figure it all out, and that this is the exciting (albeit sometimes frustrating) part about life. That it\u2019s always fresh, and every day a mystery. That youthfulness doesn\u2019t go away as long as there is something new to learn. Like why, if you just spent an hour cleaning the inside of your car windshield, it looks worse than when you started.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Father Time just chucked me out of the airplane. No bearded fairy with a slide rule is coming to save me. As 48 kicks in, I guess it\u2019s time to find the ripcord, Google how to cook steel cut oats and just keep figuring it out as I go along.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I suppose I should be more upset about it. Turning 48. Yep, that\u2019s what I\u2019m about to do. Don\u2019t have much say in the matter. Father time doesn\u2019t exactly ask if you want to go sky diving. He just throws you out the plane door whether you\u2019re ready or not. \u201cDon\u2019t forget to pull the ripcord!\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cRIPCORD!?! Nobody said anything about a \u2018ripcord?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
SPLATTT!!!<\/p>\n
I guess my philosophy is you can\u2019t get too upset over something you have no control over. Ate a whole cake? You did that. Had a mid-life crisis and bought an alpaca? Well, you should have been a normal person and bought an expensive sports car you don\u2019t know how to drive or got a tattoo that says: \u201cCouldn\u2019t think of anything better.\u201d <\/p>\n
Turning a year older is the one thing in life out of your hands, so why get bothered by it? Why rue it?<\/p>\n
Besides, I thought understood it. There was supposed to be a nice tradeoff: \u201cWith age comes wisdom,\u201d the old adage goes. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[578,557],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2201","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2021-nutshells","category-getting-old-er-older"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nutshellcity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2201","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nutshellcity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nutshellcity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nutshellcity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nutshellcity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2201"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.nutshellcity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2201\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2202,"href":"https:\/\/www.nutshellcity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2201\/revisions\/2202"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nutshellcity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nutshellcity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nutshellcity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}