Library of Wisdom
Hard-earned lessons from lives shared by choice — every card donated deliberately by its author, with the whole life behind it. The Library is young; it grows one life at a time.
3 cards from 3 lives on aging.
Education & learning · Aging
On staying a beginner
At sixty I took up the cello, an instrument that does not care about your h-index. I am, after eight years, magnificently mediocre. This is on purpose. Expertise is a comfortable country and the passport is expensive, so people retire into the three things they're already good at and call it identity. The brain that runs on rails rusts on rails. Be terrible at one new thing at all times — terrible in public, ideally. The teenagers at the community orchestra correct my bowing. It is the best hour of my week and I can prove it.
To someone younger: Be terrible at one new thing at all times. Terrible in public, ideally.
— Dr. Priya Sharma · Immunologist — thirty-four years at NIH, BethesdaDemonstration
Friendship & community · Aging
Tuesdays
You want to know what holds a life together, and everybody thinks it's the big things — the wedding, the diploma, the funeral. It's Tuesdays. Our league bowled every Tuesday for forty-one years. That league buried husbands, met babies, sat with Florence through the chemo twice. Three marriages among us went down and the league never missed a week. Pick your people, pick a day, and show up for forty years. That's the whole recipe. Everything else is decoration.
To someone younger: Pick your people, pick a day, show up. Repeat for forty years.
— Dorothy "Dot" Jablonski · Wire-winder, diner owner, fed every kid on Cherry StreetDemonstration
Aging · Illness & health
Installments
The body resigns in installments. The hands went first, which for a man in my trade is the punchline of a long joke. Here's what I know: you don't have to accept every resignation. I fought the hands three years with a buddy at the VA, a rubber ball, and pure spite, and I got a lot of good Sundays out of the fighting. Some things you fight. Some you let go. Getting old is the sorting, and nobody can do the sorting for you.
— Frank Moretti · Marine, tool-and-die maker, grandfather — Toledo, OhioDemonstration