Sharing Wisdom

My daughter who just turned 18 thinks I don't have anything useful to share with her. However, I think this has more to do with her being 18 than anything else. Also, she is a very emotionally strong person like me so she has no trouble telling me what she thinks whether I want to hear it or not. However, since I tried to raise an empowered daughter who was not crushed so much like my mother and grandmother were by life I feel somehow I have succeeded in this by not crushing her spirit as she grew up even though this was really hard for me to deal with as a man.

I wanted her to be able to say, "NO!" to anyone and hopefully I have succeeded in that because girls who always say "Yes!" are the ones who disappear often and are never heard from again. My daughter applied to 7 colleges from California to Washington and was accepted to all of them. One of them called tonight to tell us how much they wanted our daughter to attend there.

I told my wife," They really want her there. Isn't that amazing? I never had this experience in my life at all because I was raised blue collar more so it wasn't about applying to fancy colleges it was only about just going to the nearest college or colleges that had degrees in what you were interested. However, my cousin went through USC on a scholarship and NYU law school on a scholarship as well. But, neither my parenst had ever even been to college beyond my fathers going to night school to become a journeyman electrician over about 4 years when he was around 18 to 22 while working days as an electrician with his father in his business. He taught me this trade from age 12 to 17 and then again at 21 for a year after I had burnt out on computer programming for awhile because there was no random access or microchips yet in 1969 only batch and mainframes and no PCs until about 10 or more years later. So, I had worked with millions of dollars of equipment that had less power than the computers you are reading this on. We worked in buildings with fluorescent lighting 24 hours a day without any windows at all so no one could see (from the outside) the millions of dollars of computer equipment and want to steal it. But a lot has changed now from the 1960s.

The problem of sharing wisdom is that the time you share your wisdom is often not right now for people. So, even though what you might have to say might be important to their survival they might not know quite how to filter what you are saying to make it useful right now in their lives today.

The Graduate (1967) - IMDb

www.imdb.com/title/tt0061722/‎

Internet Movie Database

Rating: 8.1/10 - ‎163,931 votes

Directed by Mike Nichols. With Dustin Hoffman, Anne Bancroft, Katharine Ross, William Daniels. Recent college graduate Benjamin Braddock is trapped into an ...

‎Full Cast & Crew - ‎The Graduate (1967) Poster - ‎Awards - ‎Trivia

The Graduate - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Graduate‎

Wikipedia

The Graduate is a 1967 American comedy-drama film directed by Mike Nichols. It is based on the 1963 novel The Graduate by Charles Webb, who wrote it ...

‎Katharine Ross - ‎The Graduate (novel) - ‎The Graduate (soundtrack) - ‎Charles Webb

I turned 19 in 1967 so I could really relate to this movie at the time.

There was a line in the graduate from the graduate that reminds me of this:

It went something like: "You know what the future is son, Plastics." Which was true then but only if you knew something about plastics in the first place or were interested in them or had studied about them or were a salesman of plastics.

So, just because you know something doesn't mean it will be relevant to a young person which I find often sort of sad. They look at us and see dinosaurs and don't know that we are 1 of the sometimes 100 people we knew but we survived until now and they didn't. There's got to be some value just from surviving all the insanity you have to deal with every day of your life just living in this world.

So, I feel very privileged and very proud to still be alive when most of the people I knew in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s are mostly all dead now. And it seems crazy to me that someone born in 1984 will be 30 this year because I was 36 that year and one year later my Dad died.
It seems to me that someone born in 1970 should be 30 this year but instead they are now going to be 44. So, that just seems impossible somehow. Well, Time flies when you are having fun.