When I was in college, my classmate, Peter, found a book in the library. It was a Greek New Testament with Latin footnotes.
Even in our day books had an envelope glued to the back cover. In it was a card. When we selected a book to borrow we took the card to the librarian's desk, signed our name and handed the card over. It sealed our promise to return it. One could see a history of others who had chosen the same book.
Peter recognized no one had signed the book out in maybe a half century or more.
Neither Greek nor Latin was taught at Bates. Nor had it been taught in our formative schools. We knew little Latin and less Greek.
Peter signed it out. He wanted his name there for posterity. To the best of my knowledge no one else signed it out during our time there. We recognized and honored Peter's imagination.
When Peter signed that card, we didn't know it, but we were in the developmental stage of our cognitive life when we were most open to change. From birth, our bodies are in constant change until our late teens. Our brains are mostly reacting to that change. In our late teens, our brains have less work from growing our bodies and adapting those bodies to the changes. Our brains turn the energy outward and we can experience a flowering of curiosity about the people around us, our surroundings, our culture.
What's interesting is that while most of us reach our full physical height in our middle to late teens, our brains continue to grow in volume until we reach our middle twenties. It's during that period we have the most openness to the world outside of ourselves.
Peter and my classmates found it amusing that the young scholars generations before were educated to deeply understand obsolete languages. We were the future.
Then what happens invisibly, is once our brain stops growing in volume, it becomes harder to learn new things. We can, and our brain continues to grow new neurons even in our most elderly years, but it slows down.
It makes new things harder to learn, and for us to adapt to change. Especially when the change is us. My contemporary, Anne Lamott, reminds us, "100 years? All new people."
Warm regards,
Francis Sopper