I forget exactly where I was or what I was doing, but I recall the experience quite well as, earlier this week, I saw someone in passing that, for a split second, I just knew was an acquaintance from long ago. Except that acquaintance lives several hundred miles from here and the odds of it being that person were quite unlikely. We’ve all had that experience, but, no matter how many times that it happens to us, it’s still like the surprise ending in a book that we didn’t see coming. We fall for it every time.
More and more frequently lately, I’ve been thinking to myself that people that I meet, new acquaintances and colleagues, remind my of someone that I knew some time ago but with whom I’ve lost touch. Sometimes it’s a similar haircut, or a mannerism or speech pattern. Whatever the cue, it occurs to me that, the longer that we live, the more likely we are to say something similar to “you remind me of someone that I knew…” We’ve experienced enough relationships that we begin to see more in common with those we know. We’ve experienced more of humanity.
Experience isn’t just an attractive quality for employers, you know. We gain experience in life each day. Remember the first time that you stayed in a hotel? You had a better idea of what to expect the next time, and after two or three stays, you had even picked up some packing tricks and preferences. Travel is, I think, one of the easiest examples to which we can point of this, but it’s certainly not confined to travel. Anything in life that we experience is foundational in some capacity for other things that we will experience and work through later. That’s important, because it makes things later in life easier to handle. Difficult circumstances have some sense of providence when we can remember a similar moment in our lives when things turned out to be okay.
I watched a news report this week about a Massachusetts scientist who has claimed to have developed the long-awaited cure for aging….actually an age-reversing treatment, if the contents of the report are to be believed. The promise here, as I heard it, are cures to diseases that have previously eluded us. Apparently, though, the animals’ physiology got younger during tests.
Science frequently dances around philosophy.
What concerns me about this treatment, or rather the premise supporting it, is that it misses the truth that age is a privilege. Age, as it gathers more experiences and makes us more likely to find resemblances between new faces with old faces, gives us wisdom. At least, it will if we’re open to it doing so. Just as we can think of that person to whom we go for advice because they’ve lived through something that we are beginning to experience, we, in turn, will be able to impart our wisdom to other willing listeners as we get older. A beautifully clever design, this human life-cycle.
Of course, my point here pre-supposes that there will, in fact, be willing listeners when we’re older, which may not be the case. We may be too enraptured with the idea of eternal youth, instead. Or at least dramatically extended youth.
I’m not exactly old and wise, and I’m not trying to sound that way. I am, however, old enough that I am beginning to experience some physical ailments that I wish were easily cured. In fact, I even joined a health club recently. Want to see something out of place? Me, in a health club full of power lifters and people who run 300 miles to warm up for their real workouts. And then drink protein shakes.
And that’s great. We should take care of ourselves, and I have been remiss in not doing so. If, though, our health and youth are our ultimate concerns, the things that we hold onto above all others, and they end (because they will), what then? Youth and health are, by definition and design, better in the beginning than the end. There’s a brilliance in that, really. Because as they decrease, wisdom increases.
As we get older, we get wiser, just as those before us have done.
I think we need to recover our respect for that.