The 50 Year Old Mind

In the aftermath of Mandela's death at 95, M and I were treated to a wistful memoir of someone growing up in So. Africa as a youngster. I don't recall all the details ... I can't say that I recall ALL the details of anything, these days. But he was born in the very early 1960's and left So. Africa in the early 1980's to pursue other dreams. He spoke of how his Father, a White of perhaps Roumanian or Lithuanian extraction, worked defending folk in the ANC ... memories of some of the quiet that, of necessity, I suppose surrounded those details ... memories of the time one of his Dad's legal colleagues had visited their home, as he often had, and was to travel the 4 hours to his tribal-lands, only to be found in the subsequent days chopped to pieces .... memories of the belief that Mandela would never be released and almost forgotten, as a presence ... remembered more as a myth ...

R, the speaker, wove these and other disparate memories and thoughts about liberation and the world, in general, into a cohesive narrative of a man's life that brought at least two listeners to a wistful appreciation for his sharing the memories but, also, for one of us, at least, an awe of his capacity to bind the together into a whole ... as of one piece. The man is not a historian in the professional sense of holding some position in an academic setting and, yet, his mind (without notes) is able to synthesize smoothly complex and betimes dissonant threads. His wife is of the same vintage as R and as I recall her sitting in a graduate class I was teaching maybe 10 years ago as she was changing careers from Law to one of "the helping professions" (Hey, wait a minute! don't lawyers help?), I recall an equally articulate lady ... ah! but I wasn't in the Fourth Quarter, then.

It is the contrast between my slower Central Processing Unit (CPU) of today and that of say the time I was teaching that class that is so striking. There are, in my estimation, three types of envy:

There is a pernicious/toxic envy that seeks to have what the other has 

that is of value and/or to make certain that they don't have it;

There is a beneficent envy that moves us to appreciate what another

 has and to seek to attain something similar ... maybe that is more 

"emulation" than envy; and

There is another beneficent form of envy that values what the other 

has, realizes that it won't come or (maybe) return to you 

and sits back and enjoys the show.

May I revel in the successes of all the late 40 and early 50 year olds (and some older folk? but maybe not me) whose turn it is to now put together the next wave of cogent ideas to come, as they, themselves, inch towards the Last Quarter ... watch their kids leave ... their parents die ... in this unfolding and beautiful fractal of life.