AGE-OLD TRUTH ESCAPES YOUNG

WELL, that wasn’t too bad. I thought turning 60 last week would have hurt a lot more. But as I said to my uncle Bert, I don’t actually feel older.

Sure, I do feel a bit like I’m 60, but also feel like I’m 50, and I’m 40, and 30. Damn it, I can also feel as awkward as a teenager, even now, and I feel all those ages at the same time.

I doubt I’m alone. Just ask your parents how old they actually feel, depending on the moment.

They’ll tell you: they don’t often feel the age that’s on the birthday card, or not until they look into a mirror.

And this, folks, is a gift.

This needs pointing out, now that we’re being lectured to by a new breed of militant youth, with one 16-year-old even berating world leaders — “how dare you!” — and instructing them on how better to electrify their industrialised economies.

Here are children lecturing adults as if their youth makes them wiser, and gives them a deeper moral seriousness that is beyond anything “the old” could even grasp.

Pssst, children. Let me tell you a secret that you normally wouldn’t discover until you’re my age.

It’s this: when you talk to adults you’re actually talking to people who are children themselves. They’ve been exactly as young as you are, and still are. But we have one huge advantage over you.

We’re not only children like you, knowing all that you do. We’re at the same time older, too, knowing everything we learned from every extra year we have lived.

You see, we’re like trees. Every year we add another growth ring. The young tree is still there in the centre, but around us is the growth from every year since.

And every growth ring is made up of what we’ve learned.

We’ve learned, for instance, that what seems a catastrophe today, often does not look that way tomorrow.

For instance, when I was a child I was told there could be a nuclear winter. Atomic war looked likely and the dust from the explosions would choke out the sunlight.

Later came another huge scare. The world was going to run out of food by the end of the century. Last century, that is.

Experts were sure of it. Paul Ehrlich wrote an international bestseller, The Population Bomb, claiming “famines” would kill “hundreds of millions”.

Some of us, being young, panicked then as you are panicking now.

But living longer, we eventually learned how clever humans really are. We saw them grow more food than ever in our history.

But we also learned something else.

It’s often said that the old are too cynical, because the optimism of their youth has dried up inside.

That’s wrong. Sure, a lot of older people get more cynical, but usually only about things they should have always been more cynical about.

It’s with years and hard experience that we learned about snake oil salesman, and how some people get rich or strong by scaring

the pants off us.

WANT MORE? ANDREW BOLT HAS HIS OWN TV SHOW, THE BOLT REPORT, ON SKY NEWblo S FROM 7-8PM.

We also learned how silly it is to trust the hotheads who promise they can change the world overnight, and make it perfect.

Yeah, right. We’ve learned that these revolutionaries are just as likely as us to stuff up, Ask them to organise even just a picnic and they’ll forget the corkscrew.

So we don’t now fall for the shysters and salvation-seekers now promising they can switch off all our coal-fired power stations and somehow still get the heater to turn on in winter.

We’ve seen their sort before. We’ve been around.

But we’re not cynics. All our optimism is still there, and we’ve got more of it than you’ll see in the young.

The young, in fact, are the most likely to catastrophise and suffer depression. Just see how many now fret that they’ll be wiped out by global warming.

It’s those of us who have lived longer who tend to be happiest. We have our friends and our families — and we have our blessed perspective.

We can remember all the things we’ve overcome when we thought we couldn’t, and all things we’ve survived that we thought we wouldn’t.

Children, you too will one day — God willing — be as happy as us, and with the perspective that tames fear and gives hope.

That’s life’s reward for adding all those rings to the tree that is your life.