I suppose I should be more upset about it. Turning 48. Yep, that’s what I’m about to do. Don’t have much say in the matter. Father time doesn’t exactly ask if you want to go sky diving. He just throws you out the plane door whether you’re ready or not. “Don’t forget to pull the ripcord!”
“RIPCORD!?! Nobody said anything about a ‘ripcord?’”
SPLATTT!!!
I guess my philosophy is you can’t 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’t know how to drive or got a tattoo that says: “Couldn’t think of anything better.”
Turning a year older is the one thing in life out of your hands, so why get bothered by it? Why rue it?
Besides, I thought understood it. There was supposed to be a nice tradeoff: “With age comes wisdom,” the old adage goes.
As I tick-tick-tick toward 50, it isn’t my age that’s been bothering me. I’m 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’s the makings of a speed bump on my waist, for now it hasn’t forced any drastic action on the belt loop front.
But as I start to reach these upper ages, I’m 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’t 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.
Here I am hovering where the oxygen is thin and they hand out reading glasses by the 50-gallon drum, but I don’t feel any smarter. Certainly not wiser.
I’m starting to feel more than a little ripped off.
Where’s my wisdom? Where’s my intelligence? Where is me smarts?
In a search for the answer, I decided to Google: “Getting old so when does the wisdom train arrive?” 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’s gardener, I stumbled upon an entry in The Journals of Gerontology that began: “It is often assumed colloquially that wisdom comes with age and experience, yet empirically and anecdotally this is not necessarily the case.”
Uh … what?!? And to further prove the article’s point, I couldn’t understand any of what it had to say.
Which just made me furious. My frustration with turning 48 was growing.
I WANT TO BE WISE!!!
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, “Stuff they didn’t teach you in grade school … because you were dangerous and probably would burn something down.”
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. “Sonny, let ye be smart!” he would proclaim, and with a flash of light and a scent of mothballs, all of life’s secrets would awaken in me.
“Oh my gosh!” I would say in wonder at the revelations. “That’s how to properly cook steel cut oatmeal.”
Wisdom – The quality of having experience, knowledge, and good judgment; of being wise.
That would be me!
I would finally have it all figured out. I would suddenly know what I was doing. Everything I’ve 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.
There are so many things I thought I would know by now. For starters, how to talk and act like an adult.
But as 48 approaches, I feel like I’m getting the wisdom shaft!
Or maybe I’ve got it all wrong. Maybe “wisdom” is something else I’m just not grasping. Not a miraculous epiphany, but a realization that it’s time to stop worrying so much about finding it. Time to realize I’ll never figure it all out, and that this is the exciting (albeit sometimes frustrating) part about life. That it’s always fresh, and every day a mystery. That youthfulness doesn’t 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.
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’s time to find the ripcord, Google how to cook steel cut oats and just keep figuring it out as I go along.