Andrew Sutton, in a Comment on my post, “Partnerships? Don't! - On the contrary ...” wrote :
“BTW I wish that I understood things as clearly now as I used to. Partly perhaps this is cognitive decline with anno Domini, partly though I think that it might be the other psychological phenomenon of aging, the positive one, broadening.”
So I offered Andrew, in response to his Comment, the thought of Bob Dylan in “My Back Pages”
“Ah, but I was so much older then,
I'm younger than that now."
Long ago I read that the Wisdom of old age resides in understanding that you don't have all the answers. To which I might add, as a wise Australian once said to me, that far from understanding the answers, he was still trying to sort out what the questions were. I have always since held that unless you get the questions right the answers will almost invariably lead to wrong actions. Computer nerds make the same point: “Rubbish in – Rubbish out”.
These past few days I have been boxing books for storing in the loft while we redecorate. Last night I reached, on the top shelves, needing a chair to reach so far, my own ‘back pages’: books from my days at University College, London: among them, a treasured (21st birthday gift) set of essays on Alexander Pope; Sweet’s “Anglo-Saxon Reader”; Baugh’s “History of the English Language”. Our lecturers and tutors were among the greats of the academic world of English Language and Literature. Would that I could say this last sentence was not written with the full brilliance of 20:20 hindsight! I “understood things” quite clearly then and there were other more important matters for a young student to attend to in the 1960s.
“Ah, but I was so much older then,
I'm younger than that now."
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Postscript:
The Big Lottery has returned our Outline Proposal for funding under the Reaching Communities programme, requiring us to identify “more clearly” our “outcomes” and the “need” for the project. Evidently we did not explain ourselves clearly enough. We wanted some help funding the part-time salary for someone to coordinate our work helping parents. Better get on with rewriting our Proposal!