But now I am Six/I'm as clever as clever/So I think I'll be six now for ever and ever
I've been reading, as my current 'few pages at a time' book, a collection of essays by Lynne Sharon Schwartz. And the last one (I think it's the last) is on ageing.
And one of the things she states is her belief (which she admits is personal and prejudiced) that 'At sixty people are wise, or should be'.
(Larfs liek drayne.)
I am more with Katharine Whitehorn on that when she suggested that the old going on being what they always were, though more so -
- 'I tell you I am what I was, and more' -
- need not be an entirely positive thing, hmmmmmm?
At sixty and beyond people have had six decades of experiences: whether they've learnt anything from them is down to individual cases, and even if they have, whether what they've learnt constitutes wisdom, is a whole nother question.
Schwartz also suggests that people have an age that they think is somehow Them, which I'm also a bit dubious about.
She does say that we are actually a lot of different ages, inside, which I think is the truer thing. Possibly a lot of people's troubles arise because something activates their inner 3/5/13-year-old, and it can sometimes be hard to get past the emotional jolt.
On another paw, over those decades, most of us do, I think, learn to manage those feelings: for example, on this occasion, although I felt like an over-tired three-year-old about to have a screaming tantrum in the face of being messed around by airlines, lack of information, etc, I didn't drop shrieking to the floor on Schipol airport and start drumming my heels and yelling 'Mummy!!!!'
And, one's despair at apparently hit the wall in the comprehension of some new thing, just like when one was starting to learn writing or the multiplication tables in one's first years at school and couldn't seem to get past some particular point, isn't necessarily visible.
Though, these many decades on, one is, maybe, able to reflect, well, I did finally manage to write my name/master the 9x table/complete a PhD thesis/etc.
ETA: I wish to add that I posted all this before becoming aware that there was a new outbreak of being 6 in the school playground. Wow, synchronicity or what?
This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/1473520.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
comments.