So begins an old German proverb; and finishes with: \u201c\u2026 and too late, smart!\u201d It\u2019s okay, though. I\u2019m discovering in the elder years that much can happen: First, we grow smarter, but discover waves and mountains that we yet don\u2019t know\u2014and some of these are things that (a) no human knows yet\u2014and there\u2019s two categories here; what we know we don\u2019t know\u2014which is a list of wonders, mysteries, etc.; and what we don\u2019t know what we don\u2019t know, which is a million times greater; maybe even a billion million. (b) This category is known by a few but not by most. This too is mixed category.
– There are tons of things being discovered or proven or clarified by experts in a thousand fields, and of these, there is a spectrum of relevance and another somewhat overlapping spectrum of complexity. Some things are highly complex and I cannot understand them, or understand partly and with difficulty. Some things are simple but irrelevant to my interests. Some things may seem irrelevant, but in months or years from now, I will discover that some of these ideas or discoveries are indeed relevant to my interests.
– There is stuff known by a fair number of people and not yet by me: Most of that I don\u2019t care about, but some things would be fun and interesting to learn! There\u2019s really learning how to do well; and learning how to do medium; and just getting a crack at the feeling of doing it; and similarly, there\u2019s learning about it well or slightly.
– There\u2019s a lot of stuff that lots of people know to be true and I disagree with them! That\u2019s a funny category: I don\u2019t think this stuff is true at all, or it\u2019s laced with misleading implications.
– There is some stuff that I enjoy even though it\u2019s more mythic or poetic, including some religious ideas that are sweet, even if I don\u2019t buy the package of the dogma. <\/p>\n
Mixed in with what (little) I know, there are interests\u2014and again the funny paradox: I have very wide interests, but then again, there are many times that amount of things that I\u2019m not at all interested in, though I know that many people are interested in them and not that interested in the things I find interesting. Funny world! And even these wide interests are narrowing as I get older. \u201cThe days dwindle down to a precious few, September, November…\u201d is the verse from a popular song by Kurt Weill in 1938. And though it\u2019s romantic and speaks indeed to my love with my darling wife, it also speaks to the sense of growing priorities.<\/p>\n
(I hesitate to say, \u201curgency,\u201d because this is no time to get greedy-graspy about life. I\u2019ll die when my body and the angels decide and it\u2019s none of my business. I need to practice a bit of Buddhism about this.)<\/p>\n
But I do feel empowered to prioritize, and I am happy to say that even if I narrow my interests and desires to do or achieve this and that to a far smaller number, there are still a good many of those ambitions and interests and enjoyments! <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So begins an old German proverb; and finishes with: \u201c\u2026 and too late, smart!\u201d It\u2019s okay, though. I\u2019m discovering in the elder years that much can happen: First, we grow smarter, but discover waves and mountains that we yet don\u2019t know\u2014and some of these are things that (a) no human knows yet\u2014and there\u2019s two categories […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-722","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spirituality-and-philosophy","category-wisdom-ing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/722"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=722"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/722\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":723,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/722\/revisions\/723"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=722"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=722"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=722"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}