(non-breaking space) | too cool for school

too cool for school

I was sitting in a coffee shop drinking tea a few days ago. A couple tables away, some younger folks (probably high school-aged) were talking. Overhearing some of their banter reminded me of my own youth, specifically of the way I, and some of my acquaintances, sometimes pretended to be aloof. If you asked us, we wouldn’t say it made us cool, but we were hoping to come off that way.

In my “old age” it’s become apparent to me that we didn’t come off as anything but ignorant most of the time, something I’ve come to understand by observing the young people who are now in the shoes I wore twenty years ago. But knowing how I was at their age, I try not to begrudge them their naiveté .

took a while to see
there’s nothing original
about apathy

Comments

by howard

November 2nd, 2009

Posted in handwritten haiku

Tagged with misdirected youth, naivete

apreziosi

I suppose it's a rite of passage to have self-important thoughts that we believed at the time but seem silly now.
Occasionally I look back at a journal I kept when I was in my late teens/early twenties. I had the world figured out - or so I thought. Some of it still holds water, but most of it has later been proved false.
Whatever, it was always at least honest and based on what I had learned up to that time. I suppose that in 20 years I will look back on some of the things I wrote on my blog and wonder how I could have felt that way.
I think, with any amount of good fortune, we progress intellectually until we die. At least that's my hope.

howard

i can relate to leafing through vintage journals and laughing (or cringing) at some of the ideas i once held to firmly -- though i suppose it would be a somewhat sad thing to hold all the same beliefs over that sort of timespan. in that way, i completely agree that we should never stop developing intellectually, so may your hope become reality.