[wordup] Wisdom and Fear Feel a Lot Alike

[Adam Shand]

Via: Brett Shand <brett at earthlight.co.nz>
From:  
http:sfgate.com/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2000/07/05/ 
DD29071.DTL

As You Get Older . . .
Jon Carroll
Wednesday, July 5, 2000

AS YOU GET older, you realize what you know, and you realize what you
don't know. You are smarter, and you are also more stupid. You have
more hard-won arrogance, and also more adamantine humility.

You find that both real arrogance and real humility do not play all
that well in the real world. They are confused with aggression and
submission. They are neither. You lose patience with win-lose games,
and yet all around you people are winning and losing, trying to beat
you or feeling as though they've lost to you.

Oh, shut up, you say, in all humility.

You have learned to trust your own brain more because it has been
around enough to see the patterns. Among the patterns it sees is the
kind of patterns it does not understand. This is the beginning of
wisdom, although sometimes it feels like dying.

Wisdom and fear feel a lot alike when you're inside them. The
challenge is to figure out which is which. Your only advantage: You
know that wisdom and fear feel a lot alike.

You understand that your brain was grooved in a previous decade,
perhaps a decade long ago. The things that have happened since the
grooving are not part of your wisdom. They may be part of your
information, but that is not the same thing.

When the tracks were being laid, the world appeared to unfold
naturally. Everything seemed inevitable. You knew no better because
you knew no different.

Now you know different. You have the memory of the time when things
were different. Because you are not as comfortable now as you were
then, you tend to fetishize the past. ``In the old days,'' you say,
meaning: Back when things seemed inevitable. Back when the illusion of
shared values was complete.

TOO OFTEN YOU carry arrogance with you into battle. Daily life is loud
and fast, and arrogance seems appropriate. Actually, your hard-won
humility is more important, but you forget. You announce your opinions
and forget about your fears. You cling to the notion that the world
was young and green when you were young and green.

It wasn't. When the world was young, it wasn't green, and you weren't
there. You're just a geek from the 20th century, still fretting about
those ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

You forget the people who were old when you were young. You forget
them railing, railing. You forget the spittle at the corners of their
mouths.

HAVING ACHIEVED PERSPECTIVE, you remember again how smart you are.
This is your challenge. You have to be so smart that no one knows how
smart you are. You are playing a different game now. The game is
called ``Who was that masked man?''

The masked man was you. You have left behind the silver epiphany. You
have said the thing that will make it better. People will get it or
they won't. As Maimonides teaches, the best gifts are anonymous. You
can get so much more done if you don't worry about credit.

If you haven't gotten credit already, you're not going to get it. The
search for validation is baggage, and you need to travel light. You
need to remember what you don't know and not think of that as a
failure. Think of what you do know. What you know is not a weapon;
it's a gift.

Understand that you have few tools for judging the new. You will use
metaphors, and metaphors are inexact. And even if they apply, they do
not resonate. Who will care? Only other people like you, who will
shake their heads gravely.

Do you want that for yourself? Just sitting in a room with other
people and saying the world is going to hell? Before you got older,
you would pass those rooms on your way somewhere. They gave you the
willies. You were right then. You see?