A Final Thought: Sometimes there are no words
By Mitch Allen
Last month—on August 19—my wife and I celebrated our 35th wedding anniversary. That sounds like a long time, but it’s not.
Thirty-five years is the blink of an eye.
Of course, you cannot explain this to young people. Trying to tell a 30-year-old that their life will go by quickly is like trying to describe the hum of a refrigerator to a caveman. There are some things that you can know only by experiencing them—like the tug of a kite string or the smell of a wet dog. There are no words to describe such things.
In fact, I’d argue that nothing can be explained, and the older I become the less explaining I’m inclined to do anyway. I heard it said best in a recent podcast: “If you’ve reached the age of 100—unless you’re a fool—you have nothing to say.”
In other words, if I were a wise man, this column would be a blank page.
Wisdom, it turns out, is non-transferable. Sure, you can tell a toddler that fire is hot, but you know good and well that they will never understand it until they touch the flame for themselves.
Seeking wisdom is like chasing the horizon. The faster we run toward it, the faster it moves away from us. The more we learn, the more we realize how much we don’t know—until we reach the point where the opposite of everything we thought we knew is also true and we discover that great revelation is more likely to be found in the hum of a refrigerator than in words. Yet try explaining this to your kids; they might just get power of attorney and have you put away.
“What’s Dad doing?”
“He’s in the kitchen?”
“Cooking?”
“No, he’s listening to the refrigerator again.”
At the end of the day, no one wants to hear our wisdom anyway. Instead, all we really want is to have our own value confirmed, to be reassured that we’re okay. A long time ago, an old man from Tennessee told me that the best reply to another’s opinion was simply, “You may be right.” He also said that those four words could save my marriage.
I argued with him…and he said that I may be right.
When a child asks, “Is that fire hot?” a cautious parent might respond, “Yes, don’t touch it!” while a gentle grandparent might say, “I’m not sure, what do you think?” After all, the flame could be an imposter—one of those realistic fake flames—as is so much of life. But that’s irrelevant; the actual temperature of the flame has little to do with the child’s question.
My wife and I were aged 20 when we started dating. When things got serious I explained to her that I was no good for her, that she should instead leave me and run off with some 30-year-old rich guy. Of course, at that point, we both thought 30 was “middle-aged” and “rich” was pulling down $100 a day. That was the “truth” in those days. Now, however, the truth has changed because, surprisingly, that’s what truth does.
In honor of my wedding anniversary, I want to leave you with someone else’s words of wisdom, the 16th Century Italian poet Torquato Tasso:
“Any time not spent on love is wasted.”
And that, my friend, is the honest-to-God truth.