Importance

As we grow old there are many things that seem to us completely useless or without importance. First of all, we do not give the value we gave when we were younger to other people's opinion of our behaviour, our clothing, our way of judging. At our age today, we think it is not worth the trouble of tiring ourselves to impress, as we did in our youth. This liberation from anxieties must be one of the gifts our age offers us. Things that made us nervous, like waiting because of traffic when driving, like the neighbour's criticism, do not seem so important in old age as they seemed in youth. Not giving importance to things that today seem useless to us makes us much wiser.

One thing that is certain is that, without realizing it, we are changing with the years. The values we gave change, memories change, dreams change, ambitions change. The older we grow, the more we know ourselves. We know better what we want, what we can offer, what can displease us. With time we realize that success loses its importance. In youth, having a car, having a home in an apartment of a prestigious neighbourhood, having brand-name clothes seemed to us to be the keys to being happy. In old age what counts are the moments we live, when we say a long 'oooh', appreciating human relations. What counts is health. What counts is to flee loneliness. What counts is that we know the cold to appreciate the warmth, we know the dark to appreciate the light. What counts is that little time remains to us and we must not lose it.

We who were born in the 30s and 40s… have the chance of knowing 2 millennia, 2 centuries, life without a telephone — we waited ten years for our turn to come to put a telephone in the house — and life with a mobile phone, where we break into a sweat if anything happens to this little box where the whole history of our existence is found; life with radio, where we waited for the end of the story that had begun days before, knowing that this end would come after a few days; and life with black-and-white television, with a lamp and a belly like a pregnant woman's, and television as thin as a sheet of paper. Now artificial intelligence too has entered our life, treating us with the ethics of a more-than-human person, with honour and with kavod. In a short time I do not know whether we will remain what we are. Live and see. September 2025