I know I am not the only one who has said repeatedly in recent years, “Gosh, I wish I knew that twenty years ago!”…or ten years ago, or five, or even yesterday! As we move into our later years it’s easy to bemoan not only our aging body, but that everything we learned getting to this point would have served us better in our youth…or so we believe.
Living all these years has also given us a wonderful opportunity. Our many years of making mistakes, wrong choices, wrong actions, wrong thinking has allowed us to amass a whole lot of learning and experience. In fact, we know so much now that we might even be considered “wise”. One can only be truly be wise by having tried and failed, loved and lost many, many times and consequently, be old! So, we should put aside our regrets and grab hold of the gift of wisdom and get busy living our todays.
Being older and wiser is the icing on the cake of life. It is our comfort food to savor and enjoy and it will be our companion for the remainder of our days. It is, in fact, a gift that will keep on giving and growing as long as we choose to live life to the fullest.
We get to know a thing or two about life…to have a few answers, to have a better idea of what it takes to be happy and fulfilled. I just think that awareness might just be worth a few wrinkles, sagging boobs and gray hair. Besides, creases around the eyes enhance our eyes, our soft bodies delight and comfort our grand babies, and our gray hair makes us look like queens. We’ve graduated from our jobs as princesses. Now, we not only have beauty, we have the power of wisdom.
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Very nice!
” our gray hair makes us look like Queens” . . . what a thought! Yes, I like that!
The only things I wish I had known earlier are:
1. Education is important
2. Men love differently than women do
3. Your mother is a person and not always right.
Other than that, I have really loved my journey 🙂
Yes, wisdom is good! Sometimes I listen to people in their 30’s and 40’s and just think to myself, “That was me years ago.” They too will have to love and loose, make their own mistakes and grow just as we did. Then there will be a day that they will look back just as we do and think the same thing. Thank you for sharing and as usual your writing is always wonderful!
I agree, wisdom does make up for a bit of aging…gravity taking hold of us – it is helpful to be able to know some things in advance – because of the things we learned in the past;) thanks for the blog!
Thank you for your wisdom ~
Write on! One of the most liberating lessons I’ve learned is that you can’t be wise until you get here. This helps me as I watch my daughter as she earns her way to wisdom.
The spiritual teacher Pema Chodron says that one of the best ways we inflict suffering on ourselves is fleeing from living in the moment we are actually in…
That being said, I do my best to focus on living just this moment in my aging process and remarkably, it does reduce my sense of fear about the future and regret about the past.
Thanks for a great post, Dorothy!
You are most wise Grasshopper. I like how you look at things.
I so agree with you on that one Dorothy. Wisdom must be put in service to our needs.