November 12, 2025- If I only knew

Hang onto your youthful enthusiasms – you’ll be able to use them better when you’re older.

~Seneca

If I only knew then what I know now.

We love to muse about the lack of wisdom of our youth, about how successful we might be in various aspects of our lives if we only knew the things we know now at the time of past events. But if we knew more then, we wouldn’t have learned so much from all of our mistakes.

Our youthful enthusiasm allowed us to attempt things our later selves know we were not at all ready for. We jumped in, we messed up, we gained wisdom from the results of our errors, and here we are.

Our mistakes have not killed us, so they’ve made us stronger. Not only have we learned lessons from what didn’t work, we’ve learned that we can persevere when things don’t work. We’ve learned that we don’t need to wait for the perfect set of circumstances to make a useful attempt at something.

So many of the most important lessons we have learned in our lives came from the experience of messing up. Don’t let the wisdom of your age get in the way of the enthusiasm of your youth. Jump in. Try new things. Fail. Reflect. Grow. Persevere. We can remain youthful in that way until the day we die.