Words to my daughter
Bookworm on Mar 01 2008 at 12:13 pm | Filed under: Parenting
My daughter is a tween and is just starting to think that she is smart and I am stupid. We therefore had a little talk this morning. Or, rather, I gave her a short lecture. I explained that, when I was young and my mother, like me, was in her late 40s, we used to do Israeli folk dancing together, a very popular activity amongst Jews in the early- to mid-1970s. I learned dances in an instant, remembered them forever and was as light as a feather. My mother learned dances painfully over days and weeks, forgot them quickly, and moved stiffly. My teenage mind reached an instant and absolute conclusion: I was much smarter than my mother.
It’s only now that I’m my mother’s age, of course, that I see what was actually going on. When we’re young, our fairly empty minds absorb information like sponges. When we’re old, and our brains have hardened, we throw information at ourselves and hope that some of it sticks. Confusing memory with intelligence, however, is a mistake. As I explained to my daughter, while I may be slower to learn now than I was 30 years ago, I still know infinitely more than she does based upon those 30 years of experience, both in terms of hard facts and life knowledge. My last words to her were that, as she grows older, she should never confuse my slow learning ability, which is a product of age, with a lack of intelligence.
Surprisingly, rather than appearing hostile, my little bookworm seemed rather impressed by this speech. We’ll see how it goes as time goes by — but she certainly now has more insight than I did into the difference between age and wisdom, on the one hand, and youth and memory, on the other hand.
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As I explained to my daughter, while I may be slower to learn now than I was 30 years ago, I still know infinitely more than she does based upon those 30 years of experience, both in terms of hard facts and life knowledge.
My explanation would be this: She is a computer that has a large memory and may process information quick, but I’m the computer programmer. I may need a calculator and software to do my task, but the computer couldn’t do it on its own no matter how much RAM or CPU processing speed it had.
The reason why the computer has so much need for RAM, permanent memory, and CPU speed is that it can’t connect the dots. Only with experience and sentience can one connect the dots and use parallel thinking over serial processing.
A smart person can figure things out simply through brute force processing speed and power. A wise person figures things out because he or she has already seen the solution in act and simply needs to recall or modify it to the now.
Thus this is why no matter how smart you are when young, a retarded veteran of many wars will still kill you faster than you can think “I’m in trouble”.
Also the confidence of youth is there because Nature decided that in order to test out many risky scenarios, she needed to program into her creations a confidence and belief in their own immortality. This way, they are gloriously and happily do dumb things, believing they are right, while Nature sits back and observes which disasters occur to whom. Older folks have survived because they have learned the trick of the con.
Oh btw, the reason why Nature needs these people to experiment for her, is because Nature abhors stagnancy, which is what old folks like to create.
In a roundabout way, I used to tell my daughters that, hey, I have been sixteen, but you’ve never been forty.
I didn’t listen very much to my parents either.
Greetings:
My father was of the “I may have taught you everything you know, but I haven’t taught you everything I know” school of thought.
It’s starting, BW. Our 16 year old occasionally gives me the impression I should not be breathing in her presence. And many of our friends recount similar unfathomable irritations. I’m glad Miss Bookworm open to discussion. She will change as her perspective changes.
Al