Youth Vs Wisdom

I was reading a book yesterday and I stumbled upon a section that made me pause and ponder: “Youth has the right to experience things. Wisdom has the duty to be patient, even though she knows the answers. I guess this is one of the ways one can show love- not to take away the right of someone else to make their own mistakes.

The passage simplifies in a great way why we have these constant parent-child dramas and fights, why we often find the elderly to be annoying, when trying to gift us with some morals and lessons, why we insist on making the jump, even though people tell us the chasm is too wide and deep.

Love and awareness can truly be expressed through patience and willingness to accept that the other needs to walk their way with their own mistakes and scratches, even though they might be a mirror of your own. I guess that’s what makes parents so worried in general- they see their own aching, flashing in front of their eyes and they just don’t want their kids replicating it. However, it’s truly never exactly the same. It’s still a martini, but with a twist. We add a spicy olive instead of a regular one or we serve it in a tall Collins glass instead of using a cocktail one.

This constant debate fascinates me. The camp that insists on packaging their learnings and pitfalls into a buttery, fresh out of the oven pastry, handing it out on a silver platter and the opposite camp that insists on being hungry for experimenting with their own recipe. It’s a game of pulling the rope even though both camps are fighting for the same team.

Youth does not get satisfied by simply hearing that the stove is hot. It has to touch it with its own fingers to experience that temperature on its own. Then, it would finally agree with Wisdom’s words.

I guess life could be simple if we just listened to those who had played that game before and had stayed ahead for longer, but wouldn’t this strip the thrill away? We are wired to be hopeful, even though the odds show we could be in a losing position. We want to make sure, we want to see it, feel it, cry through it and then get over it. A recipe for building our own experience portfolio and becoming more resilient to the winds of life.

So parents, please forgive us, but we will still not put 40% of our salary into our savings account and will book this one-way ticket to Costa Rica anyways.

Love,

Youth