Do Older People Have All the Wisdom to Share?

What’s the best advice you’d give to someone younger than you?

We tend to assume wisdom flows one way, from the older to the younger. But the longer I live, the more I doubt it. The young still forgive without a ledger, ask their impossible questions, and believe the world can be better. Somewhere along the way, many of us lost all three. Here is a reflection on what the young still know that age made us forget, and why the arrow of mentorship may point both ways.

The reflection’s central truth is:

Wisdom does not belong exclusively to age. God often teaches adults through the qualities children naturally possess—wonder, forgiveness, openness, trust, and hope. True wisdom flows in both directions, and spiritual maturity means growing older without losing these childlike virtues.

The Best Advice I Can Give the Young Is This: Don’t Take Mine

There is a quiet arrogance built into the very question. What is the best advice you’d give to someone younger than you? The phrasing assumes the arrow of wisdom points only one way — downward, from the older to the younger, from the experienced to the untried. We have grown so comfortable with that assumption that we no longer notice it. And yet the longer I live, the more I am convinced it is mostly wrong.

So here is my advice to the young, and I offer it knowing how strange it sounds from a man my age: do not take my advice too seriously. Watch, instead, what you already know how to do that I have forgotten.

You still know how to begin a thing without first calculating whether you will finish it well. You forgive on Tuesday what wounded you on Monday, and you do it without a ledger. You ask “why” without embarrassment. You weep openly and laugh from somewhere deep, untrained by years of learning to manage your face. You believe, still, that the world can be made better, and you have not yet been persuaded that this belief is naïve. These are not the deficiencies of inexperience. These are competencies. And somewhere on the long road of becoming respectable, I lost most of them.

The Gospel, I think, knew this before any of us. When the disciples came arguing about who was the greatest — the oldest argument in the world, the argument the original prompt quietly takes for granted — Jesus did not settle it by ranking them. He set a child in the midst of them and said that unless they turned and became like that child, they would not even enter the kingdom. Not teach the child. Not correct the child. Become like the child. The direction of mentorship was reversed in a single sentence. The small one was placed at the centre, and the accomplished men were told to learn.

“Out of the mouth of babes and infants you have ordained strength,” the Psalmist sang, long before. Strength — not cuteness, not charm. There is a power in the unguarded heart that the guarded heart spends decades trying to recover, often without success, and at great expense to therapists.

I do not say this to flatter the young or to romanticise youth, which has its own follies and can be cruel and shallow as easily as anyone. I say it because I have watched too many people my age mistake the accumulation of caution for the acquisition of wisdom. We call our fears “prudence.” We call our cynicism “realism.” We call the slow closing of our hearts “maturity.” And then we sit the young down and instruct them to become more like us, as though our weathered defensiveness were the summit of the human project rather than one of its sadder casualties.

The truth is humbler and more beautiful. Wisdom does not travel in one direction. It moves between people who are willing to learn from one another, and the willingness matters more than the age. The grandfather teaches the grandchild patience; the grandchild teaches the grandfather wonder. Neither exchange is complete without the other. To pretend that only the elder gives and only the younger receives is to impoverish them both.

So if you are younger than I am, here is the whole of what I have to offer, and it is less an instruction than a plea. Guard the things in you that the years will try to take. Keep asking your impossible questions. Keep your capacity to be astonished. Keep forgiving without a ledger. Do not let anyone — least of all an older person quoting Scripture — convince you that growing up means growing hard.

And when you meet someone my age who has somehow kept these things alive into old age, sit at their feet. They have learned the hardest lesson of all: how to become old without ceasing to be young. They are the ones worth listening to. The rest of us are still trying to find our way back to where you already stand.

That, in the end, is the best advice I can give. Be slow to take advice — and quick to notice everything the advice-givers have lost.

Written in response to the WordPress Daily Writing Prompt — 23 June 2026

Johnbritto Kurusumuthu

Founder 

RISE & INSPIRE

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