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Experience, the richest teacher

Sadly, attempts to introduce local teens who express willingness to volunteer to visit the elderly in a nursing home usually end abruptly after a first visit. Comments like “That’s disgusting” are arguments for never returning. Obviously, these youngsters have never been exposed to life after 60, not even in their homes where old age is treated as something to be ashamed of, where eldest members are scooted off when reaching a needy age, out of sight, to spend their last years unwanted and alone.

But one day, a Chinese student from Michigan Tech volunteered to visit. He walked in, viewed the mass of people in wheel chairs, idling in the open hall walked over to the nearest gentleman who was humped over, lost in another world. The boy knelt down in front of him, looked up into the old man’s face, and asked, “What’s the matter, grandfather? Don’t you feel well?” A grunt issued from the old fellow, prompting the boy’s next question: “Would you like a ride, grandfather?” Another grunt. So the boy got behind the wheel chair and briskly rode the fellow up and down the hall.

A change came over the man. He lifted his head and in pleasurable anticipation waited for each run. Then – for the first time in months, he smiled!

The difference between the Chinese boy and the others his age was obvious. We live a youth-oriented society in which new, state-of-the-art, is good, and old is to be discarded. But in Asian countries, the aged are revered, respected for their valued years of experience. The young Chinese fellow, accustomed to recognizing age as a treasure, would find it hard to understand us.

While “intelligence” is measured largely by how a person reacts to any new situation, “experience” expands, adding building blocks by which to live fully.

As novelist Henry James once said, “Experience is never limited, and it is never complete – a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.”

Experience has the power to vanish ignorance that can be replaced by the experiences gained as they are transmitted back and forth through a lifetime.

Said Mark Twain, cleverly and wisely: “We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it – and stop there, lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid.

She will never sit down on one again – and that is good experience; but she will also never sit down on a cold one anymore, either.”

Experience comes in diverse ways, but primarily from from family (parents, elder relatives and friends), teachers (in the classroom or the workplace), and literature (books, periodicals, daily papers).

Through experience we learn how to tie shoes, cross streets, differentiate between love and sex, avoid the natural vicissitudes of life, eat healthily, study, make friends, settle down with a carefully selected mate, and find pleasure in curiosity.

An elderly lady lived alone in the luxury of her apartment in the better side of town. She was old, but she had her memories. “I have lived,” she told a friend. “I have seen Pavlova dance, I have seen some of the finest art in Europe, and I have surrounded myself with people of great intellect. And I have learned from them all. I can close my eyes at night and dream of concerts in Vienna, boat trips on the Nile, the top of Mount Everest, sunning on the white sands of Hawaii – and all this by never leaving the confines of our little community. Honestly, what I have experienced vicariously during my lifetime has been quite enough. I am old and infirmed, but I am rich.”

As the philosopher Hegel once said, “I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided – the lamp of experience.”

The elderly lady, living fully within the restrictions of her wheel chair, her apartment and the riches of her lifelong experiences would agree with him.

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