JUST CONTEMPLATING - ON SIGNS OF GROWING OLD. THE END...

Namely that, each person, each generation of humans, do not ordinarily perceive and analyse the world of humans.  

Armed or informed with the accumulated and collective experiences, learning and knowledge of our species. 

We do not ordinarily take a rain check on what progress has already been made, and consider how we can add and contribute toward it.

So, we see signs of growing old, when we see the younger generations denying that any progress has in fact been made. 

And arguing for a radical overthrow of everything, and for a new start and beginning to be made. 

Because, with the benefit of prudence acquired through the process of growing old.  

We, the old, have come to understand, and even appreciate, how succeeding generations of young people, might also want to destroy, ignore and discard what this generation has built. 

If no or insufficient value, is given to the constructive endeavour and accumulated achievements of the older and preceding generations of humans.

Instead, it seem to be our tendency to approach certain, if not many things, either as givens which must be taken as we find them. Or as controversial issues on which we are going to become 'experts' on.

What all of this seem to suggest, is that the older generations cannot explore and experience the world for the younger generations. 

As painful and gainful as it might prove to be, each person, each generation, need to accomplish this basic task or challenge for themselves. 

Even if they are guided, to various extent, by the exploration and expressed experiences of those who have gone on before them. The older generations. 

Just as how we are not able to die or suffer death to avoid others, all, having to experience it for themselves, when their time has come.

We know that we are growing old, and even wiser, when we are able to acknowledge, accept and embrace this as the normative process that it is. 

As we endeavour to prudent use the process of growing old, to prepare ourselves for the fall from the cliff of destiny, and into oblivion.

That the world is, to some extent, like the potter's clay, with each succeeding generation of potters, endeavouring to have the experience of remoulding and reshaping it, according to their desire. 

And, in so doing, having to break up what has already been made, even though they might, eventually, replace it with the equivalent of what they have destroyed.