The Grown-Ups Are Bewildered

Yexian

Where ritual is absent, the young are restless or violent, there are no real elders, and the grown-ups are bewildered. The future is dim.

~ From Chip Conley

A five-year-old boy who lost his mother in the crowd at a fair approached a police officer and asked him:

“Sir, have you seen a lady walking without a child like me? “

~ Gabriel García Márquez

The older I get, the more I realize that childhood and old age not only meet, but they are the two deepest states in which we are allowed to live. The true essence of an individual is revealed in them, before or after the efforts, aspirations, ambitions of life.

The eyes of the child and those of the old man look with calm candor of those who have not yet entered the masquerade dance or have already left it. And the whole interval seems like a void of turmoil, an empty commotion, a useless chaos for which we wonder why we had to go through.

~ Marguerite Yourcenar

Money and power are inventions of distrust.

~ Hermann Hesse

You escape mediocrity only through skepticism or mysticism — the two forms of desperation against knowledge. Mysticism is an escape from knowledge, skepticism a knowledge without hope.

~ E. Cioran

The prayer: “Lead me not into temptation” means: “Keep me from seeing who I am.”

~ A. Schopenhauer

We’re tempted by the masquerade dance to try to convince ourselves and others that the mask is who we are. But eventually, it’s just too much effort for fake rewards. Approval of the world means less and less as you age, especially if it’s for an act. The world will pay for your act if it’s entertaining or impressive enough. If we wear the mask and perform our tricks long enough we can lose touch with who we really are.

We can grow old without becoming the elder we might be, still performing an act that has grown stale. The world needs all the wisdom we can muster, and if we don’t even know who we are we’re not much help. Our society is pretty wobbly right now, and the lack of wise elders is a bad sign. If money and power are indications we don’t trust, does that mean we don’t even trust ourselves? If we don’t know ourselves it stands to reason we can’t trust ourselves.

And then, of course, we’ll end up trusting people who will make things worse for us. Our political scene and business world has been turned over to people without vision, totally without wisdom. Where is the wisdom we seek? Religion, philosophy, literature, sports? It’s hard to it find anywhere you look. But since it’s so scarce we attach ourselves to concepts and programs that are full of money, power and fakery. We don’t know how to judge.

Mikki Lee

The voice of authority that is so sure of itself can easily be ungrounded and detached from reality. In our society wisdom masquerades as how to get ahead, how to work the system. People flock to those who profess to lead us to the holy grail of wealth and success. That passes as wisdom in our culture.

Attaining wisdom is not automatic as we age. If we keep our minds alive to the essential questions we have a chance, but nothing is guaranteed. Deciding early in life that the big questions have been answered by some system or avatar is the common way to stop growing. If we can keep from cluttering up our hearts and minds with readymade answers we at least have a chance to come upon some helpful insights.

We may even keep our childlike ability for wonder. That’s not a small thing. Losing wonder is a serious soul wound. An old person who has a childlike wonder is wise, is healing for the world.

Odilon Redon

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Meditations On Living (6 book series)

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by David Price