LIFE LESSONS
Another Year Older, Another Year Safer
There’s one upside to being young and stupid.
Many months back, during one usual lunch hour, I and my colleague had this casual conversation about an unusual online article, which detailed the famous Mount Everest summit and base camp trek.
I casually asked, ‘So are you planning to go to Mt Everest trek anytime?’
And my colleague replied: ‘Haha! Not in this lifetime. I am not that young anymore.’
‘No, you are. You are super fit.’
‘It is not about fitness. There is an age when you are naive. You think you can do a lot of things and nothing will happen to you. As you grow, you tend to become more practical and realistic. You get a better estimate of your strengths and weaknesses. You realise what is possible for you and what is not.’
Those lines hit hard, harshly exposing the fleeting nature of the mad energy we are all born with.
Once I started thinking about it, I kept seeing more examples of this inverse relationship between risk-taking and getting older.
- A kid grabs his new skateboard, climbs up the flight of stairs and skates down. He falls on the way, gets hurt, but takes back the skateboard and does it again. He keeps repeating it till he is content.
Now, there is a high chance that ten years from now, he’ll lose the courage and gumption he has now. He might still have a skateboard. But odds are, he’ll be super scared about breaking his bones, getting bruises, developing permanent scratches from cuts on his face or spraining his ankle. - A fresh graduate is more inclined to get into entrepreneurship or choose performing arts as his career than someone with 15 years of experience.
I heard a lot of full-time writers, entrepreneurs and stand-up comedians say this — ‘I don’t know how I did it then. If you ask me today, whether I would quit a high-paying job to follow an uncertain and doubtful path, I don’t think I’d do it.’ - A madcap footballer known for reckless chases during his college days takes a personal accident insurance plan for playing weekend football in his thirties.
Your naivety is one of your biggest strengths. And as you age, you lose this naivety slowly.
There is a period in life when you can afford to jump first and then think if you should have jumped or not. Your inquisitiveness, adventurous spirit and, of course, your ignorance… they work to your advantage.
Once you gain knowledge about handling the consequences, once you learn your limitations, you become more timid. Your risks become more calculated.
You get scared to fall. And so, you get complacent. You have responsibilities and people to take care of, which squarely narrows your possibilities and filters out non-safe routes. Furthermore, you realise that you have less time and energy to recover should you fall.
There is a popular Shirley Hufstedler quote:
“If you play it safe in life, you have decided that you don’t want to grow anymore.”
Sadly, the reverse is also true — if you grow up, you’ve decided that you want to play safely in your life.
There’s a bitter irony here. We gain knowledge and experience that help us analyze and judge new things better as we age, but at the same time, we lose that childlike adventurous rage to try those new things.
Naivety sure does have a lot of disadvantages and cuts two ways. But sometimes it can really be a blessing in disguise and work wonders for you.
