As the playwright George Bernard Shaw put it, "Youth is wasted on the young," a perspective most often appreciated from the vantage point of experience.
It's a funny quote but one that hardly resonates with me in my doddering old age.
As I look back over the decades I realize that when my youth's vim and vigor could have benefited from the seasoned wisdom that comes with age, I was always better off not having it handed to me.
Wisdom rises like the proverbial Phoenix not from our easy successes but from the hard-earned ashes of failure.
Put another way, if we know what we cannot do then we will never have the blind courage to forge ahead into the unknown.
It's the wrong turns in my journey that have provided the boundless treasures of my life.
If you're unsure about taking a chance; breaking the mold; trying something new; chancing failure, then I would suggest "age is wasted on the wise".
If it is wisdom holding you down, time to take a chance?
