KNOWLEDGE

I pledge never to turn my back on it.  There are many people I've come to admire through my PAGASA work because they are no longer young, are quite accomplished, but who come to us not just impart wisdom, but truly listen to what everyone has to say with openness, respect, even awe and gratitude. We've met PhDs who come because they want to learn more, not because they think they are the sole bearers of knowledge.  What a contrast to people who've spent so many years in school but can't seem to hold their lives together because their education, instead of setting them freer in the world, has trapped them in outdated concepts and ideas of what it means to be human--if they even took that up.

I want to grow old always seeking--and never thinking that I don't need to know more or worse, that I know it all.Horrors. I want to grow more open in my old age and more willing to listen to others and still be excited about learning something new, no matter what I've been through, seen and heard in my lifetime.

It's healthy to strive to keep learning, the older we get.There is nothing more admirable than seeing someone age so beautifully and so well, not fighting time with bad behavior and terrible fashion choices, but riding its passage with grace and an ever-widening openness to what the changing world has to offer. I would hate to grow old and so set in my ways that nothing new could move me. I want to be able to excitedly shout, HEY!, to a great new idea fluttering into my still changing brain from someone young and still coming into being.  I want to be constantly excited about what the next generations bring without ever feeling regret or envy or the need to look like that again. I don't want to be irrelevant, please God, not that.  I want to have the energy to know more each day and the mental agility to move into something new with grace and confidence.

Learning requires openness, humility, grace, determination, discipline,  an ability to awaken oneself, receptivity and a nose that isn't sniffing invisible competition somewhere in the ether. May we all take that hunger into our twilight years, constantly challenging ourselves to take in and give, take in and give, until at last, our time is up.