A sad fact of life: wisdom comes too late

Have you ever made a mistake so many times that you thought, ‘Hang this up, I’ll never make it!’? This is the experience of life, or at least part of life, for each of us, and it is particularly relevant to our relationships; the closer the relationship, the more difficult it is often to resolve.

“We grow old too soon, too old, too late, too smart…” -Scandinavian/German proverb. A variant of this is the Dutch saying: “We grow old too soon and we are smart too late.” Yet another is: “Too soon old, too late wise.”

Mistakes are a way of learning. It is said that we can learn the easy way (by observation) or the hard way (by our mistakes); we are invariably destined to learn and relearn the same tired things, until we learn them forever.

Take food portion control, for example. This is one that I have constantly had to learn and relearn. And I’m still learning it. I’ve now reached the point where the pain of having an overly full and bloated stomach for several hours is worse than the reward of thirty minutes of gorging on tasty food.

But, it was a process to get there. Now it seems to me a much better perspective to have that feeling of hunger; it is a pain that I enjoy because I am rewarded by delaying my gratification. As long as this behavior continues until it forms a habit, that is, over a period of two to three months, I have a chance to learn the lesson once and for all.

It is a sad fact that with life comes the disappointment that knowledge comes too late. It is a sweet but bitter irony. We may know the theory long before it is finally practiced consistently. This is life.

Copyright © 2008, SJ Wickham. All rights reserved throughout the world.