You can’t put an old head on young shoulders.

My grandmother used to quote this to me often. She was such a wise woman, born long before her time. I would love the opportunity, at the age I am today, to sit down and talk to her. She is the one behind me and much of my work and writing. Her wisdom often guides me today from the other side. The words of her from my childhood of her still resonate in my head for a long time.

‘You can’t put an old head on young shoulders’ is an old Gaelic saying (proverb) and it’s no wonder many of their sayings originally came from there. Many of these old sayings give us an idea of ​​how these people thought about things like the qualities of generosity and humility and the company of others. On the other hand, boasting and stinginess were, and still are, frowned upon at best. However, great understanding of people’s weaknesses and faults was shown. And that is still true in Gaelic culture today.

Wisdom is the gift of time and experience. The older I get, the more I see and understand how impossible it is to expect someone to come up with ideas long before her time or age. Maturity comes as we get older, as a result of the experiences we have had and without them we are stuck where we are.

There are people I know today, who are adults, who have not yet matured in their own emotional health. I know people who were emotionally marked when they were little by things that happened to them in their lives from which they have not been able to move forward, thus becoming victims of their past.

And then sometimes we see or hear of people who have ‘old heads on young shoulders’ (similar to the idiom ‘wise beyond their years’) and marvel at the wisdom that comes from such a short life experience. Sometimes children come out with expressions or information that is astonishing, leaving one wondering where it came from, since they had not had the experience to go as deep. They act older and wiser and sometimes have a much greater disposition than their own peer group, which tends to coincide with their growth over time.

We often hear it said ‘if we only knew when we were young what we know now, how different our lives would be’. I wonder. If we knew then our life would have been different and our lessons would not have been the same. We have come into this life to learn certain things that depend on the type of learner we are. Some of us are slower than others to get the message and some of us get it faster.

I think that depending on which senses are strongest in us, we get our lessons using the ones that are there for us. Personally, I’m an experiential learner, which means I have to do it, feel it, and understand it to learn the lesson or skill. I’m not auditory so I don’t expect to learn that way.

The three basic styles that have been talked about for many years are Visual, Auditory and Kinesthetic (tactile and movement-oriented). As the digital age approaches, we now find that there is a fourth sensory style of digital learning that leads us to another way of understanding our younger age groups called Digital Auditory.

Do you understand your own sensory force? This can be quite life changing if it is a new concept. We need to communicate and understand that everyone communicates from their own style of meaning, which means that unless we know something about that style we can misinterpret the person and what he wants or needs. The five main senses we are talking about are sight, hearing, touch, touch, smell, and taste. Intuition comes in like a sixth sense.

As adults, we should not expect a young person to have the wisdom or maturity associated with older people, even though we are sometimes surprised by today’s youth who sometimes think and talk far beyond their years.

We often hear someone refer to a person as an “old soul,” which also means that they seem older and more informed, with more wisdom than their own age group. Many believe that certain children are unusually mature because they have somehow retained the maturity learned from past lives.

We can reverse the saying to ‘young head on old shoulders’, which would mean that someone is still mentally astute, despite being older in years. We sometimes say that someone older is ‘young at heart’, which means that they have the ability to see things from a younger perspective and live a life similar to that of the younger age group.

So if you are lucky enough to meet a young person who has the disposition of someone much older, enjoy their insight on life as it can be very refreshing as they see things from their younger/older perspective. The same goes for someone who is of middle age but shows that he prefers to be with those in a younger age group who tend to stimulate him and his thoughts to stay informed, mentally active and alive.