A thing or two …….on the Spectrum life.
“A thing or two” ……. of moments in our lives ….. the memories !! …………….. The “spectrum” of it all .
Memories of the good times and the bad times too.
I remember them well. Like the chapters of a book, if each one was a year in passing.,
As the uncertainty of longevity unfolds, and the closing chapters unfold, you remember them more often, the double digit number rapidly approaching it’s three digit neighbour.
And yet !! as you too must remember….. the ups and downs of the first twenty. The ones that often, through their duration, you perceived to be the worst years of your life.
The formative years… of walking and talking, of unbounding energy. The discovery of life’s simple fundamentals, the curiosity and accumulation of knowledge.
The first twelve took so long and you wished them away as they dragged along year after year, one after the other. You couldn’t wait for each one to pass. Suddenly you were thirteen. A milestone in your life. Now you were a teenager and rapidly approaching that stage when there was nothing more to learn. You were just beginning to…….. know it all!!
You finally reached nineteen. Now you were in your twentieth year and perhaps by then you even had some work experience, even had a tiny bit of wisdom. Now you began to realize how little you knew about the generics of life, even when you thought your mind was full.
You only thought …………. you knew it all!! How strange the realization….when reality kicked in.
Yes your life is one chapter after another.
You begin to get established in a chosen career or maybe no career at all. You do whatever you can and let fate take its turn.
To me ; the greatest human quality is just plain old wisdom, plain old common sense and a good dose of humanity
I often think of my own childhood, long before the teens reared their ugly heads. The people I knew during that stage of my life when I spent much of it running around the African bush, when school was my nemesis, like grit in my oyster, when my bare white feet were like impenetrable pads. The black and white people I knew, who mentored my life, who showed me simple truths, kindness and how to be human.
Those were the formative years’
I wonder what it is that gives us wisdom. Not school education. That only gives us specifics. Not a belief system, a religion. That only stirs the inhumanity in us.
I don’t think it matters what we do, it’s not “a thing or two” it’s an infinite “spectrum” of life!!
“A thing or two” …. about memories. Do you ever get carried away by them….
I do. Memories of successes and failures. But not dwell on them for too long. Do you ever consider how the past stimulates your thoughts of the future.
In a career as an innovator of mechanical widgets. I recall often thinking about the big lumbering steam driven clanking machines that I began my working life on. The primitive technology in some elements of those machines could never be replaced and I often built those primitive ways into the widgets that I made
Its a vast “spectrum”of the elements of life…certainly not.. just “a thing or two” !!.
M.A.D.