“Good advice never gets old”
Words of wisdom get lodged in my head and I like to get them out so they can be shared with anyone else who might find them useful.
- “Good advice never gets old” - JC spotted this one at a gas station on the way back from picking her up at the airport after her short trip to Lubbock.
- “At twenty a man is a peacock, at thirty a lion, at forty a camel, at fifty a serpent, at sixty a dog, at seventy an ape, at eighty a nothing at all.” I think about this Gracian quotation quite a bit, especially as I approach “lionhood”, which is a good description of what I’ve been feeling now that a lot of my shiny surface is starting to wear off and I feel like I’m maturing in some hard to define way. The older I get the more I feel like I’m being either polished or worn down. When I’m feeling optimistic, it’s polish. When I’m feeling negative, it’s being worn down. I thought about the stages one goes through in life yesterday when I was at the grocery store behind an old man while waiting to check out. He look slowed and bowed by time with his modest selections of frozen vegetables and twenty pound bag of wild bird seed. He seemed almost transparent or invisible, and I tried to imagine him in his twenties or thirties and how he might have been different. Surely, he was not preoccupied with feeding birds then. Maybe as we get older and we realize we have more life behind than ahead of us, we take more enjoyment in the natural world around us that will live on after we pass.