Truth and the poetry of logic

My dear dd mentioned that we think alike. Ah well, what can I say - great minds. But, truth to tell, she has outstripped me in many ways. What I have is perhaps the advantage of experience.

This experience is of little value in today's world. A good friend puts it succinctly:

"I know the answer. It is easy to say but hard to do. The world is moving so fast, we are becoming obsolete by the time we are 40. A friend of mine was retrenched. Because he had a good package, he took his time looking for another job. By the time he found one he liked, two years later, he couldn't hold it because he found he was obsolete. He waited too long and was too fussy about the jobs he was willing to do."

Bearing in mind that our life expectancy is in the eighties, this means that for those retrenched in the 40s, they have some 40 years of being irrelevant to society. Because that is what having a job means. It is not just about making ends meet, our work, however much we dislike it, is how we identify ourselves in the eyes of society. It reflects our place in society and also our value. True, it is not about money. Being a good mother, for example, counts for a lot and certainly, most mothers are way underpaid.

It also doesn't make sense for society to have some 50 percent of its population not working. If you include those who are students (many of us are fulltime students to our mid 20s), then the number is easily more.

On the other hand, it is impossible for us, as we grow older, to keep up with the latest. And so, even as we try, we know we will not be able to keep up with the young. Does this mean that our shelf life ends at 40? If so, this will spell disaster to the modern society.

The alternative then is to find a different, yet still useful, role for us as we grow older. I think we have to accept the fact that we must continue to learn. But as we grow older, we bring something more than a blank slate to the table. We must find ways to make what we bring an advantage.

What we, the older amongst us, bring is something not measured by logic. It is the reason why science needs both experiment and logic to achieve truth. I like it that the two words - experience and experiment - stem from the same root word. My dear dd will call it intuition - something that women have more than men.

The one great truth is that whatever we believe now is wrong. Not entirely so, but wrong if we think we know it all. We need to open our minds to new possibilities, and in the free world, we will not be hampered by naysayers. So, yes, dear daughter, your teachers were wrong.

Africa's "Mother of Trees"