Early Morning thoughts, March 6, 2019
The age-old story about the Sphinx and her riddle to travelers goes something like this: ‘what animal in the morning goes on four legs, at mid-day on two, and in the evening upon three, and the more legs it has, the weaker it be?’ As an aside, she allegedly strangled and devoured those unable to correctly answer the riddle.
The correct single word answer to the riddle, although perhaps is not immediately obvious, is ‘man’ – an animal which crawls on all four when a child (morning), walks upright on two as an adult (mid-day), and walks on three with the help of a cane when old (evening).
Being in the evening of my own life (without the need for a cane, BTW), I look at man’s individual growth and maturity a bit differently, but, then, I am not the Sphinx. So, here’s my own view of man’s life.
I agree with the Sphinx that man has three stages of life, but the stages are not based on numbers of legs we use, but rather on stages of our own mental maturity. When we are young and living with our family, we are learning about life and are vulnerable to outside forces and violence, so our parents (the adults in the room), teach us and they protect us. This is the first stage.
Ignoring effects of the hormonal stage that happens while we live at home, at about the age of 18-20 years, we venture out into the world and try out, for ourselves, what we have learned so far. Some things we learned while living with our parents work for us individually, and some things don’t. What we do learn during the next 15-20 years away from home is basically that 1) our parents were not perfect and therefore did not do the best job of teaching us what we, individually, need to know, 2) life among humans is far more complicated than we ever expected, and 3) this is our life we are living – we are not living someone else’s life. This is the second stage.
At around age 35-45, we now evolve into what I call the mature adult stage in life where we know the basic rules of the road, become protective of those beliefs and those people we cherish, and realize that maturity comes late in life, but now we ‘get it.’ Now we live in the third stage of life – our own individual life. And this life is grand. All that hard work and all of those mistakes we made seem to have worked for us. We are now mature and responsible adults. Yahoo! Life now becomes simpler, if for no other reason than we have asked and answered so many questions for ourselves, that we now know the answers that are right for ourselves.
And, because we now are seasoned humans, we are now able to give back to others. We become teachers of the younger set(s) of humans. Of course, one new lesson we learn quickly is that not every young student is ready for the lessons we are now able to teach. What works for us individually does not work universally for everyone else. We are, after all, all individuals and we all learn and grow at different rates and in different areas of life. We are not part of a group – we are single individuals.
By this third stage in life we also now realize that there really is good and evil in the world, and so, we are usually on the lookout for the evil bas-tards that exist in our midst. Sometimes, even in this mature stage of life, we come across really smart and clever evil bas-tards, and then we miss the signs of fraud, and we get taken advantage of. That would be an ‘oops’ on our part. But we keep on learning.
Having noted that, our senses for detecting truth vs lies is now much better in the third stage, and even if we only rely on our own gut level feelings, we are able to circumvent many problems that we would have been suckered into when younger. So, life in the third stage gets better mentally, although not always physically. Yes, it is in this third stage that our bodies start to ‘relax’ into old age, and physically, we become weaker and more vulnerable to physical attacks by others.
However, as long as we are alive and alert in our third stage of life, we tend to deal with the truth as we see it, and we start to ignore or shun the lies and the fraud that comes from the evil bas-tards in life. Life becomes far simpler for us. Gone are all of the needs for ‘things’ and complicated ideas we embraced as youngsters. We see things far more simply and clearly (in my opinion) than at any other time in our own individual life. We are able to cut through all of the bull-crap and get to the basics. We know what is important.
This helps explain why governments hate the elderly, and why there is a prejudice in the workplace against the elderly. Both systems of control are often based on fraud and deception. Sadly, much of human life is based on fraud, deception and manipulation, and the last thing the frauds and manipulators want to deal with is the clear headed truth tellers. So, to the frauds and manipulators, the truth told by the aged must never be acknowledged or dealt with – it must be simply attacked and destroyed. Does this help explain why I call a certain ideological and religious gang immature? Does this help explain why I have no use for government fraud, manipulations, and forced controls over others? Does this tell us why big social media and big Internet companies censor and filter certain discussions? They do not want the truth to be discussed in the public forum.
I suspect the elderly don’t usually want government controls over them, so socialism and communism are not usually embraced by the mature individual human. Why would any mature individual want to be part of any organized gang? And, while the young can be manipulated or conned into embracing (or simply into tolerating) socialism and/or communism, the mature elders will tend to condemn both ideologies. Both are simply gang mentality. In my opinion.
And while all of this is not to suggest that all third stagers are mature humans – because they are not, the odds are still in their favor because they are more mature than they were in their younger days. Maturity counts.
It’s funny (odd type funny), but while government wankers want the eligible voting age lowered to age 16 (huge mistake in my opinion), the third stagers seem to want the voting age raised. I, for example, and assuming we still have to deal with a force and violent government, want the voting age raised to age 35 or 45 because it takes that may years to mature the human animal. And yes, I realize that is just my opinion, but this political view has been simmering for many decades in this old guy’s brain. I value age and wisdom.
But I also value very highly the dynamic and struggling second stage of human development – it really is an incredible learning stage in life, and I think we all should do our best to bypass the deadly and debilitating landmines in life, and support the unwritten human goal of living as long as possible.
I observe that some, maybe many, humans will reach the third stage of life and not be comfortable with either the mental or physical aspects. But it is what it is, and we must do the best we can. Always.
So, for us all, I want us to have a great day for today and for the rest of our lives, and for us all to continue to do the best we can with what we have for abilities and resources. This is our life – no one else’s.
As the Nike motto says: Just Do It! Live life to its fullest. This is our chance.
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