On Wisdom and Its Absence

I envy Jason Bateman. Not for having been named Harvard University’s Hasty Pudding Theatricals’ Man of the Year for 2022, but for possessing the handsomeness I’ve always wished for but lacked. And for his youth. He’s only 52 years old; a mere child, it seems to me, as I wade through life in what behaves like a retirement village for 80-somethings.  Age, though, is an artificial construct.

Age does not necessarily equate to infirmity or to mental decay. Indeed, I have friends whose 80+ years have done nothing to slow them down. One guy runs a program in which very senior retirees rehabilitate old computers and distribute them to deserving individuals and institutions. A woman I’ve considered young and beautiful since I met her a few years ago celebrates her 70th birthday tomorrow. She looks just as gorgeous and alluring as ever. And my own lovely IC is nearly that age—and only a year older than I; her youth shines through as clearly as if it were the bright light of a 30-year-old.

Still, though, I envy Jason Bateman. If I had his looks, his youth, and could maintain the added wisdom I have accrued since my 52nd birthday, I would be in an enviable position, indeed. “If” is a mournful word. One of my favorite, and most melancholy and wistful, songs of the early 1970s was “If” by the musical group, Bread.  I remember some of the lyrics to the song:

If a man could be two places at one time,
I’d be with you.
Tomorrow and today, beside you all the way.

The entire song is sad, plaintive, and pensive, yet simultaneously uplifting and joyful. I guess that’s essentially the definition of wistful. I like that word. Wistful. It fills me with a sense of unrequited longing.

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I dreamed I had just completed a formal orientation as a new employee of a very large, complex, sophisticated association management company. I was just one of hundreds of association executives completing some sort of training program before being sent out to select en masse to select the company car which was part of the compensation package for each of us. The cars were located someplace within walking distance. To get there, we had to walk through a very seedy, dangerous-looking area; both sides of the stretch of narrow road were bounded by brownstone walk-up buildings. At street level, clustered closely together behind dirty plate glass windows, small shops hawked their wares and services: tattoo parlors, tobacco shops, bars, pawn shops, massage parlors, liquor stores, and assorted other places. Strangely, I felt somewhat more at ease as I passed by the shops than I did in the company of my fellow new-hires and our bosses. Nonetheless, I felt out of place and I wished I could leave. When I awoke from the dream in the middle of the night—around 1:30, I think—the experience was clear in my mind. I considered getting up to write it all down, but I did not. As a consequence of my laziness, I’ve lost what I believe was a significant part of the dream. There was much more, I think. But it’s gone. Just hazy vapor, disappearing even as I try to retrieve my vision of those moments.

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Being grateful for one’s good fortune sometimes competes with one’s sense that the gratitude could have and should have come much, much earlier. Not that the objects of gratitude could and should have come earlier—but that one should have should have acknowledged earlier how much good fortune one has experienced. That disappointment in one’s late gratitude is hard to overcome. Regardless of the difficulty, though, one should overcome it. It is an integral part of maturation. It is a natural byproduct of the accrual of wisdom. One’s understanding of the passage of time tends to intensify, just as one’s experience of time tends to accelerate during the course of one’s lifetime. We should not beat ourselves up because we did not “get it” when we were younger. We should, instead, marvel at the young in our midst who somehow grasp the concepts much earlier than we did. We were not so much slow on the uptake in our youth as those young prodigies are incredibly fast. Granted, they are few and far between, but they are out there. I have seen them.

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I try to have a positive attitude about life in general. I really do. But sometimes—far too often—I lapse into a depression, when negativity overwhelms my attempts to look at the bright side. The advice I get during such episodes—see a counselor—seems so vacant and pointless, yet later I wonder whether it might be good advice, after all. Yet I remain firmly convinced that one’s “moods” are largely the results of extremely complex interactions between the chemicals in one’s brains and the effects of external stimuli on one’s emotions upon which “talking it through” probably has little impact. Perhaps I favor the “chemical” explanation because it removes much of the responsibility from me and places it on electrochemical processes over which I have little control…at least directly. But the anti-anxiety tablets my doctor prescribed for me during the last months of my wife’s hospitalization had no effects as far as I could tell. So chemicals to combat chemicals is not a sure thing. Just me thinking “out loud” through my fingers. There’s no resolution; just the musing of a confused geezer.

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My fascination with the idea of a small motor-home has returned. Seeing images and videos of tiny, motorized, self-propelled houses again has sparked my curiosity. I really need to experience a slice of life in one of these itsy-bitsy traveling living-dining-sleeping pods to determine whether I really want one of my own. But I don’t want to rent a behemoth. I want, instead, to test a much smaller version. In an ideal world, RV dealers would offer inexpensive two or three day rentals that come complete with an experienced traveling companion who could answer questions along the way and who could respond to minor emergencies involving grey water  or black water or blown tires, or inoperable retractable awnings, etc. Hmm. That might be a business opportunity for me. But, first, I have to find an available rental for that little RV and its human counterpart.

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I continue to wait for more definitive word about my brother’s condition. But doctors cannot necessarily give definitive information about matters over which they have neither control nor prescience. We—the collective we—expect medical professionals to have foreknowledge of the future. We want them to tell us, with certainty, things about which everyone, including doctors and their colleagues, are inherently uncertain. We can only wait to see how nature expresses itself and how the body responds to medications, treatment, and time. As frustrating as it is for those of us who remain un-institutionalized and relatively healthy, it is frustrating by a quadrupled factor of ten to the person living through the inherent uncertainty surrounding his own experience. Ach!