Forever Young

Cognition Nostalgia

When I was young, the world was new, amazing, mysterious. My earliest memories are my fondest memories. They are the beginning of my existence. Prior to then, I never existed. No wonder then that these memories are so influential to the rest of my life.

Today, the world isn’t really any older. It wasn’t any newer then, either. I’ve gotten older, not the world. Lost is that excitement I felt when meeting the world for the first time. I miss that. What happened? Over time things were no longer new, and I started to accumulate an understanding of things based on my experiences and imagination.

Things once new became routine. Never again exciting, or at least “unknown.” My life became an interpretation of events, instead of a pure, raw experience of things. This aged me mentally, spiritually, emotionally. My conclusions, my pre-judgments of life, acquired the emotion of “knowledge,” rather then the excitement of new things. Soon I was addicted to the sense of security and comfort I got from the emotion of knowledge, and attacked all things that questioned it. I wasn’t safer, feeling knowledgeable, but I felt that I was. I felt in charge. Life showed me how wrong I was, often, so I became fearful too, realizing that I was actually wrong about so much. That’s part of getting old, and it stinks.

How do we get back to a “new for me” experience of life? An obvious answer is to keep moving onto things that are indeed, new to me. I’ve lived my life like this, quickly bored once the “thing” is met and “known.” Hungry for new stuff, I’d dive into new topics and crafts, immerse into their lessons, and once my curiosity was spent, move on. Trouble is, one never learns very well, things they spend little time with. When acting on impulse and curiosity alone, mind enhancing though they are, jumping from thing to thing as whimsey does, it is little more than entertainment.

In life, we need more than the “experience and understanding” of entertainment. We need to produce. We need competence. This means working with the same thing, in a particular way, a way that has become routine, perfecting a routine that meets an ongoing need. But there is a subtle opportunity. Every time you repeat a thing in life, you are meeting it for the first time with your prior experience and understanding. You never really repeat anything, when your ability to do a thing grows every time you do it. With that in mind, art and mastery take an exciting role. Young again!

A sponge for information, high energy, I grew up paying attention to everything, and was always trying to do everything—at the same time. Given the kind of person that I am, for me to find a reason to stay on topic, to find that youth vigored learning that art and mastery provide, my experience and understanding allow me to see deeper in to the same old things. This is key to staying “Forever Young.”

My curiosities to see, to do, to understand haven’t anything to do with social acceptance. I’ve never worried about what people think about what I do, and what I do not do. I stay young in life because of my focus on the art and mastery of things, which provoke “new to me” subtleties of work.  Education is the ongoing process of learning how much you’ll never know. Art and mastery can be an endless pursuit, an endless reward.

Excited, my mind, my heart, my soul is as young as ever, even though my body is getting quite old. I still have and treasure a child’s curiosity. This curiosity is driven by the want and need to do, which requires abilities that only come from learning. Free to learn, free to be me, no regrets, no regards, it never ends. Learning past social assumptions, the simple truth of things, from experience and my best effort to understand. As I gain experience and understanding, I am able to see, ask and pursue the next round of questions regarding my work. I only discover them by trying.

Much of what you’ll learn when living this way will cancel much of what you were told, or at least accepted, as “they way of things.” You’ll find out when and where you’ve been wrong—and always—where you’ve been incomplete, in your experience and understanding of things. Accept it. Enjoy the power and rebelliousness of reality. What’s more youthful then that? Reality is perfect. We are the ones who get it wrong. Let go of “certainty” and you’ll be a force in life.

Stay young in your daily life. Hunger to know, then go find out! Pick a thing of special interest, stay on it, learn the next round of questions. See them, ask them, learn their answers. Repeat as necessary. 🙂

David Weeks, Information Developer, Tampa, Florida.

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