Age and Wisdom

There have been a lot of things written (mostly by me) about the horrors of middle-age -- whinings comments of wrinkles, age spots, flabby bellies, gray hair, near-sightedness, or chin hairs. Unfortunately, all of those things are true for SOME people (not necessarily me. Pleeeeeease tell me that those don't apply to me ... even if it's not true. It'll just make me feel better.) But you know what? With age comes wisdom. I've heard that somewhere, and it's constantly repeated (primarily by older people), so it must be true, right?! The more I ponder on that little statement, I think it's got to be true. And here's why.

Go to a club and you won't find older, middle-aged people gyrating and grinding up against a stranger on the dance floor. Why? For one reason, gyrating can cause you to throw a hip out. Secondly, middle-aged people tend to be a little wary of strangers, and grinding on one isn't particularly the smartest thing to do because he might be an ax murderer. Lastly, most middle-aged people don't stay up much past 10:30 (which is considered extremely early in "club time") because they've come to realize the true beauty and value of sleep over the years.

Think about it. It's not the middle-aged man who's arrested at the ball park for stripping off all of his clothes and streaking across the field. It's not the middle-aged woman who is kidnapped at 3:00 in the morning because she's walking down the alley alone to get to her car. It's not the middle-aged man who is charged with vandalism because he was painting his name on the town's water tower. It's not the middle-aged woman who is arrested and has her car towed because she was driving 50 miles over the speed limit with her fellow middle-aged friends leaning out the windows yelling at other cars as they drove by. Middle-agers are past that. Many of them have "been there, done that" and are grateful to have simply survived.

Excitement in life is nice. But once you hit middle-age, safety and security become even MORE nice (or nicer, if you prefer good grammar). Middle-aged people would like to think they're going to actually make it to the next stage of life, so they tend to think of ways to do this. Examples of this might be: to NOT put your make-up on while you're driving to work ... to NOT crawl out of a moving vehicle and climb on the car's roof just to see what it's like to ride ON a car and not IN a car ... to NOT mouth off to the extremely big, angry guy standing next to you in line. Middle-aged people think, maybe sometimes too much, but still, they think. And that's a good thing.

So, the next time you spot one of those pesky chin hairs, or you try to run to cross a busy street but your "get-up-and-go" doesn't cooperate and you look like you're doing nothing but flailing in the middle of the road, celebrate in your wisdom! You've made it this far! We middle-aged folks need to embrace the adage "with age comes widom". Someone's got to ...