I Am Too Old To Start Learning This

Yusuf is sixty three, and he has a sentence he uses, and it is entirely sincere.

"That ship has sailed."

He says it lightly. He says it with a smile. He said it in June when his nephew offered to show him something on the car, and he said it in July when his daughter suggested he come along to a thing at the community center, and he says it, in one form or another, about four times a month.

And here is the thing about that sentence: it does not feel like a defeat when he says it. It feels like realism. It has the texture of wisdom. A man who knows what he is and is at peace with it.

But look at what it has done in his life over about six years.

It started around fifty seven, and it was not about cars. It was about a computer thing at work, and it was reasonable then, because he was two years from finishing and it genuinely was not worth it.

Then it was about the phone. Then it was about the new system at the mosque hall where he does the bookings, which he now cannot do and somebody else does. Then it was about a language he had been half learning since his forties. And now it is about a car he has owned since 2019 and about which he knows precisely what he knew in 2019.

Every single one of those was a reasonable decision on the day it was made.

And together they form something that nobody decided, which is a man of sixty three whose world has been very slowly getting smaller, one sensible sentence at a time.

His daughter said something in August that he did not answer.

She said, "Baba, you're going to live another twenty five years. What are you going to do with them?"

And he laughed. And she waited. And he said, "Eat," and everybody laughed, and the moment passed.

And then he lay awake for a while that night doing arithmetic about twenty five years.

Every one of those was reasonable, and the total is not

Let me put down what I am not doing, so nothing has to brace.

I am not going to tell an older man that he must learn a new thing to be worth something, because that is a lie and it is a cruel one. A man of sixty three owes nobody a demonstration.

And I am not going to guess at anything about that car, because I have not seen it and it would help nobody at all.

What I want to look at is the arithmetic of the sentence, and then at what God actually says about an old man.

Here is the verse.

They shall still bring forth fruit in old age; they shall be fat and flourishing.Psalm 92:14

Now sit for a moment with how odd that is as a piece of writing.

The psalm is describing the righteous planted in the house of the Lord, and what it says about them in old age is not that they are honored, or remembered, or at rest, although all of that has its place elsewhere in Scripture.

It says they are still bringing forth. Present tense, continuing action. Producing. And then it uses two words that mean full of sap and green, which is the language of a tree in the growing season, applied deliberately to an old one.

That is God's picture of an old man. Not a finished thing. A producing thing.

You are not past the point where anything new goes in, and Scripture puts fruit in old age as the ordinary expectation rather than as a remarkable exception. It is written that they shall still bring forth fruit in old age and shall be fat and flourishing, which is a description of the normal rather than the extraordinary, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a true thing about a man of sixty three on a Tuesday.

You have been planted rather than stored, and the passage puts the fruitfulness in the planting rather than in the vigor of the one planted. Psalm 92 has them planted in the house of the Lord and flourishing in His courts, which makes the source outside the man, and the Holy Spirit is what makes that a fact rather than a compliment.

The sentence is doing a job

Here is the part I want to be honest about, because it is the reason a good sentence gets kept.

That sentence protects something, and the something is real.

Because learning a new thing at sixty three is not the same as learning one at twenty three, and anybody who says it is has not done it. At twenty three, being a beginner is your job. At sixty three, being a beginner is a costume, and everybody in the room can see it, including the twenty five year old who is patiently explaining, and there is a particular flavor of that which is genuinely hard to swallow.

That ship has sailed buys a man out of that room. Every time. Instantly. And it does it while sounding like wisdom rather than avoidance, which is why it has lasted six years without ever once being examined.

So I am not going to pretend the sentence is stupid. It is doing real work.

The question is only what it costs, and the cost has been going up.

You were never asked to be comfortable in order to learn, and no part of the written word makes fruitfulness conditional on dignity. Psalm 92 has the flourishing happen in God's courts rather than in a man's own estimation, and the Spirit of God is what makes an awkward afternoon a place where fruit is genuinely borne.

And I want to say the thing about your daughter's question, because she asked something serious under a light voice.

Twenty five years. That is the actual arithmetic. That is longer than a childhood and most of a career. It is not a coda. It is a stretch of life with about nine thousand days in it.

A sentence that made sense for two years at fifty seven is now governing a period longer than the one it was invented for.

You have a great deal of time in front of you, and Scripture treats that time as growing season rather than as an epilogue. It is written that they shall be fat and flourishing, which uses the vocabulary of a tree in leaf about an old man on purpose, and His Spirit is what makes that vocabulary something to plan around.