Ethyl Muses: Growing old

It's funny how much your view of life changes as you age.  When you are young you give no consideration to growing old.  You are going to live forever.  Oh, you know someday all humans die, but when you're young that does not apply to you, or else it is so far down the road you never even stop to consider it.  That remains the case until you hit your mid forties, more or less.  Then the mid life crisis sets in.  You must come to terms with your own mortality. You have to deal with the realization that now that particular fact does indeed apply to you. 
When you are in your twenties or even thirties, for that matter, and you see a middle aged man jetting around town in a new bright red convertible sports coop, getting a hair transplant, sucking in his gut, doing everything in his power to look like he's still in his twenties, the tendency is to laugh at the sheer foolishness of the entire process.  The same applies to women.  The gray strands are exchanged for platinum blond, the breasts are surgically enlarged and firmed up, the sagging jaw line and the bags under and around the eyes are removed, the falling derriere is lifted. And sometimes, with either sex, the dead beat drag of a marriage partner is also disposed of  in the process.  They enter into a quest to find themselves.  They both are trying to recapture the youth that has already been spent. 
Life is like money.  You use your time on earth to purchase experiences.  To discover.  To locate that which brings you enjoyment and to dispel that which fails to please you.  And you do have to spend time to collect that knowledge. There is simply no way to get from birth to forty without living it.
Many people fail to understand the difference between knowledge, understanding and wisdom.  Knowledge is the accumulation of information, facts, data, etc.  Understanding is when you begin to see how that information can apply to you, and wisdom is when you begin to apply that understanding to your life in such a way to benefit yourself.  And in order to arrive at the point where wisdom enters in, you have to spend some of your precious life garnering  knowledge and understanding.  It is a sad fact of life, though, that with certain individuals, wisdom does not always come with age.  Sometimes age comes alone.