A good friend of mine sent me a happy birthday email the other day (I turned 52) – in it, he ‘wrote’ that he hoped I was getting “older and wiser”, to which I replied:
“Defo getting older but not sure if I’m getting wiser….
I said to a friend yesterday that, in some ways, yes, I do think I understand life more as I get older but, in other respects, the older I get, the more I see, hear and experience, the less I can relate to it, the less I ‘get it’ – maybe that is a sort of understanding, an understanding that comes with age and experience….as the years pass and we become wiser, only then do we realise that it’s not what we thought it was when we were kids – maybe it’s only with age and experience that it dawns on us that there is no rhyme nor reason to anything, no big plan, that most everything and everyone around us are bonkers, that we can’t make sense of any of it and that all we can do is try to do our best, bring up our families as best we can, try to make a difference, try to put a smile on people’s faces, try to counter the evil out there with a bit of kindness, try to get to a place wherein we feel peace of mind – I think peace of mind is the holy grail, far, far harder to achieve than fame and/or fortune…”
Maybe that is a reflection of ‘wisdom’, realising that we don’t know, that we don’t understand, as much as we thought we did, maybe a reflection of wisdom is the appreciation of, and the acknowledgment that, the more we know, the less we know.
I think that genuine, deep in the soul, happiness is only achieved when peace of mind is achieved….
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