Elderhood in Other Words

If you don't learn the poverties, you don't know anything.
And if you don't know anything, you're not a grown-up.
You're just a bag of aspirations and fret and striving to be free.
But what's human freedom really? Is human freedom to be
freed from anything or everything? Or is human freedom
the capacity to act differently in the face of an utterly

unchanged circumstance? I tend to think it's the second one.

Human freedom is an exercise in being willing to proceed

otherwise when nothing in the circumstance rewards you

for doing so. Elderhood, in other words.

Stephen Jenkinson