Each month, we ask our featured cover person what they would tell their 20-year-old self. Without fail, it’s sage advice. Something they couldn’t have envisioned in their youth; something which has become clear only with the passage of time.
For the most part, I find mature people are often more contemplative and generous, and less reactive in their viewpoints than younger people.
As we move through the experiences of living, we encounter differences of opinion. It makes us think, evaluate and, sometimes, it moves our viewpoint a few degrees in one direction or another.
Lately, I’ve been noticing that it’s not so much about shifting my viewpoint, as it is enlarging it. Instead of taking a solid position at one point or another along the spectrum of options, I am expanding my position to include more than one viewpoint. Instead of “either/or,” it becomes “yes/and.”
Paradoxes don’t always need to be viewed as incompatible. They can, in fact, hold some valuable insight when you consider the possibility that everything isn’t black or white, but a combination of the two, even black AND white.
I find fewer and fewer things in life are absolute. There’s often room for more than one meaning or a variety of options, instead of just one.
As a young person, I was more apt to choose belongings and interests based on brand rather than performance. We were often influenced to choose friends, partners and careers based on the narrow criteria handed to us by teachers, pastors, family members and society, rather than for their individual merits.
This is right, that is wrong. It’s like this, not like that. Which often led to assumptions like, “I am right. You are wrong.”
When we begin questioning these assumptions, it can feel like the sand is shifting beneath our feet.
Comparison is a wonderful tool for evaluating and assessing. When it is used as an inclusive, considering tool, it opens our minds to perspectives that can be enlarging and encompassing of a much greater truth.
When it is used to judge and exclude, however, it becomes a tool with which we can bludgeon those who hold dissimilar opinions.
I like the idea of being a sage, of growing wiser with age. It’s one of the gifts that life bestows upon us.
I’m reminded of a commonly told Zen teaching in which an old farmer experiences a series of reversals in fortune. His neighbours respond with sorrow in the unfortunate times, and celebration in the favoured times. The farmer expresses equanimity throughout. Neither sorrow nor celebration. Simply accepting what is without naming it. In the end, as one circumstance becomes the catalyst for the next, we see how life continues to unfold and what holds great grief or austerity in one instance can be what brings about joy and abundance in the next.
As sages, we greet life not as if any moment is forever, but simply a transition point to another moment that may be totally opposite in its inflection.
May we hold all the circumstances of life lightly, knowing their transiency, and knowing that the polarity of the universe will swing in the opposite direction soon enough.
To the degree there is uncertainty in this, there’s also a degree of comfort. And there again is the paradox.
As we celebrate our 20th year of publication, we are grateful for the many “sages” who have graced our covers. Here’s just a few:
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