An insight on life and how we look at things
Age is just a number, is it?
For when you start to think you have had a hold of it, it slips right then and there.
“Age is just a number. It carries no weight. The real weight is in impacts. The truth is that you can do it at any age. Get up and be willing to leave a mark.”
— Israelmore Ayivor, Leaders’ Front page: Leadership Insights from 21 Martin Luther King Jr. Thoughts
For most part of my life, I hated the idea of age and what it means for everyone around us. In our society, we tend to think that one gets wise with the age, How do I know that? Lets say, I needed to grow faster than most, growing up in a middle class family where money was always a thing that pulled everyone’s serve. As I and my only elder brother grew up, my dad started working harder and longer to sustain our family needs, as a result he grew apart from me. Eventually, my brother was asked to help out in the family business and he quit his studies in seventh grade. I knew, I was the next in line.
I had to grow faster and smarter to not let that happen. At age 13, I had the best graphics designing project in a class of some 25 year-old students. At 16, I started working in cold calling tele-sales. At 18, I started my e-commerce startup and failed by 20. By 21, I left my family and moved 11,000 km away to live, all alone, to make something out of myself. At every step, I was playing at a game for which I was told to be too young and I was told to have patience.
I was having a blast in life having experiences that most of my peers would have five years later. I was playing with the big guys and that was inflating my ego. I was constantly outdoing my expectations and even when failing, I was growing. I had learned to accept failure as a blessing and not a curse because in my mind I knew that on the other side of the pain of failing, an opportunity to grow as a better, wiser person was waiting for me. For me, age was just a number.
Another reason that I believed age to be just a number was less about what I could do or was doing and it was more about how and what I thought. I was fortunate enough in my childhood to think about life without getting stuck with other people’s dogmas. I took everything objectively and had no exception for my religion, my parental advice, or my cultural values. Nothing was forbidden for me. I had the courage of trying to understand things for myself instead of just trusting the truths I was presented with.
This is the thing that I am most thankful for in my life. Taking time out of life’s chaos and making a philosophy of my own about it. Not many people do this in life and they spend their life in a reactive manner and not in a proactive manner. I also wasn’t given the luxury to step back from life in a silver platter, and, no one told me the importance of it. But , It seemed like a rational thing to do so.
I haven’t lived a super successful life by the often shallow metrics of our world. But I lived a life true to myself for the most part. I took charge of my life from the age of 13 and made my own decisions, took wild risks, failed and grew wiser. Every year was better than the last, every month better than the last and every day better than yesterday. It was these experiences that helped me become a wiser person and not the age.
For the most part of my life, a major chunk of my acquaintances were older than me and I had grown accustomed to hear, “You’re just a baby”. My response for last few years have been that I feel like 35.
It is not just growing old in it’s shallow description that makes you wiser, rather, one gets wiser by understanding the complexities of life — the paradoxes of complex systems of the world that surround us. One gets wiser by learning to differentiate between truth and lie, both objective and subjective. One becomes wiser by not only understanding one’s own emotions, impulses, shortcomings, strengths, virtues, morals, culture, dogmas but by also understanding other people’s in an empathetic manner.
Wisdom is knowing that you know nothing, it is knowing that growth and wisdom lie just after the finish line to the race to grow as a human, even if that means failure. One can live a safe and sound life by not running in this race of failure but that won’t ever take us toward wisdom. Wisdom requires sacrifice of our ideas that have no concrete ground to stand the harsh confrontation of a better idea. As brilliantly expressed here:
“Wisdom comes from knowing your limitations, understanding the reality, stretching it and failing at it”
It has nothing to do with aging in its purest form. I have seen people much older than me and have never understood part of what I have spent my time in doing so. They have grown and developed a peter pan syndrome and are not capable of owning responsibility to their existence and circumstances.
It’s a hard journey towards wisdom and requires oneself to be vulnerable in the face of being wrong. To seek wisdom voluntarily needs us to question things objectively and separate us from those truths.
This brings just too much uncertainty because for a short time, there is a risk that the floor you were standing on was made of glass and the minute you look at it critically, it might just shatter into million shards of glass.
That is the first step toward becoming wiser and grow as a person but moving toward this uncertainty first requires humility to be wrong. This humility to be wrong comes with time. When we are younger, most people are trying to figure out basic things of life which are more often than not, very simple and not too risky. Hence, we don’t get too wrong and we soon get comfortable by not being wrong. Then we stick to that as we are trained and some of us try not to swim in the deep uncertain waters. We don’t know what’s the point of dwelling our-self in these deep waters. This is where most people start biological ageing and stop the journey toward wisdom.
This humility requires us to be comfortable of swimming in this void of nothing until we finally reach a shore that is stable enough to sustain the weight of our existence.
Age is just a number in the sense that it’s not a must-have condition to be wiser. Some people go on the path of original thinking and get to overcome the prerequisite of age in becoming wiser. It comes to your experiences in life that makes you wiser and understand the realities of life.
However, there is some truth to the statement that wisdom comes with age and there is a simple correlation between two.
The path to wisdom that I chose was a voluntary path but unfortunately not all of us stumble on to this path or take voluntary courage to do so, Our education, parents, society and friends never make it sound like a valuable thing to do so and we just keep living our life as passive spectator without ever understanding it. Until we hit the brick wall and realize we never understood what was a second hand knowledge in our life.
Time is the best teacher and that’s because if you have a shred of sensibility, you learn something from a mistake. Even if it is to not do it again, you still manage to leave wiser. Whether we admit it or not, we all make mistakes in life and fail sometimes, even when we don’t welcome them voluntarily and eventually at some stage in life, we are forced to be wiser.
Despite me being taking charge of my life and wisdom, I was the stupidest person when I had formed a conviction in my mind that I have understood much to the life. That’s where my life started to become a living hell. Every failure started to hurt more than ever as there was nothing wrong done by me any more. I wasn’t taking any responsibility of my actions when I had conformed that I have sorted out my shit. So the key to stay wiser is to keep learning and never think that there is nothing to learn.
Our world is changing at such a fast pace and even if you take the initiative to understand it, as soon as you stop, it won’t be too long before your understanding is expired. The only way to stay wiser and relevant is too always stay humble in your knowledge and think that there is still a lot top learn.
So my comrades, my advice don’t let the age be a hindering factor in your wisdom and choose a voluntary path of being wrong, being tested, being a failure. It will save you a lot of time later in life making mistakes that people will be making at a much older age and out of their willingness. Meanwhile, never go too far in this direction and grow complacent that you know everything.
As Socrates said, “I am the wisest man for knowing that I know nothing”.
Every year you know more than you knew a year ago and that is the biggest pleasure of my life. I am addicted to be proven wrong.
Thanks for reading Writers Guild — A Penname publication
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