“Growing old is no more than a bad habit which a busy person has no time to form. “
– Andre Maurois
Kabir – The couplet
पहले यह मन कग था, करता जीवन घात ।
अब तो मन हंस भया, मोती चुन चुन खात ॥
transliterated:
Pehle yeh man kag tha, karta jeevan ghaat|
Ab to man hans bhaya, moti chun chun khaat||
Translation:
This mind was a crow in the beginning, pecking at life at each step |
Now it has matured into a swan, picking pearls carefully at each step ||
My understanding:
Aging is a process that begins at birth, and continues till death. It is as inexorable as time itself.
But aging does not imply the presumed accompanying growing wise. That is an external effort that each one of us has to apply to the storehouse of knowledge we collect, in order to distill out understanding and extract useful value.
Just as with churning curds to extract butter, there is a fair amount of extreme effort required – the curds do not easily give up the butter. And once the butter is extracted, the remains need to be used/discarded appropriately.
Similarly, we need to collect knowledge, and then apply clarity, rationality and experience to the store to extract understanding and wisdom. We then need to DISCARD and sometimes DESTROY the remains, so that it does not pollute later collections.
In the absence of this, we only grow old, not wise or smart.