“we don’t know what it is we’re headed for: the old are innocent children of their old age. In that sense, man’s world is the planet of inexperience.”

“We are born one time only, we can never start a new life equipped with the experience we’ve gained from a previous one. We leave childhood without knowing what youth is, we marry without knowing what it is to be married, and even when we enter old age, we don’t know what it is we’re headed for: the old are innocent children of their old age. In that sense, man’s world is the planet of inexperience.” Milan Kundera in an interview with the New York Times, 1988.

An interesting comment by Kundera considering in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, he posits that a life lived once may as well have never been lived at all.. (amusingly a friend to whom I recommended Lightness reminded me of this theme just days ago, and now this quote appears.)

In many places where I’ve struggled against not-knowing, against my own inexperience, I’ve started to realize how much wonder and awe exist in our lives exactly because we don’t have the benefit of lessons learned from lives lived before, because we’re children, wide-eyed, to worlds that stretch out before us to explore.

And I hope – I try – not always successfully! – to remember to look out upon those expanses not with an adult’s fear, but a child’s glee and interest, a child at play in the fields of our lives, loving, living, learning — laughing!

Toward the end of my time at Hamilton, a friend of mine and fellow philosophy major (who understood Kant better than I ever hoped to) introduced me to Rilke: Rilke spoke to the solitary spirit in me, urged me to embrace it, as somber and sobering as his letters were.

Somewhere on that path, I think she also recommended Kundera, whose search for meaning in the intimate and mundane details struck me like no other. For quite a while theirs were the books I considered most indispensable in my personal library – and I still have them, Letters to a Young Poet still bookmarked with a feather I picked up while sitting on an embankment on the edge of the road at the top of that golf course at on the Hamilton campus, watching the sun drifting down over the valley, reading words about solitude by a man long gone to a young poet long gone.

And feeling that despite the vast differences in our experiences, environments, histories, places in space and time, we share enough to understand each other, enough to speak to each other even across the boundaries of life and death, to pass on – not knowing, but – a little wisdom.

Somewhere in there is the seed of all love, because though our individual histories make us solitary, it is what we share that makes loving possible.

Perhaps that’s my response:

We each inherit a brand new world, and are naive to our lives – a beautiful gift that allows us each to hunt for our own treasure of meaning – if we choose to see it that way.

And yet we are blessed with the ability to understand and communicate with each other, to share ourselves with enough clarity, to see each other with enough clarity, that makes our lives meaningful far beyond the edges of our vision, that makes love possible.

Never doubt that your life has meaning, or that you have touched someone deeply; never think that you have not already done good in the world. If there is even a tiny bit of kindness in your heart, even the most minute grain of care and compassion, then you have undoubtedly acted upon your goodness many thousands of times already.

You will never know the full effect of your kindnesses, because they are beyond measure, & by far the better and more essential work than these simple words.