Today is a fellow Asia Sailor’s birthday.  He kinda challenged me to expound on age and wisdom.

Wiser or Just Older
By: Garland Davis

“Youth is wasted on the young.” — George Bernard Shaw

The philosophers tell us that as we age we gain wisdom from watching others and from our own successes and failures. I have given this much thought. About five minutes since a Shipmate asked me to expound on age versus wisdom.

• If you can sit in the CPO Mess and diagnose a problem with a feed pump and give instructions to correct it based on information from the LPO, without seeing the equipment, you are wise beyond your years, Grasshopper.
• If you can stand a Bridge Watch and know the location of all contacts by instinct, even when the ship is maneuvering you are possessed with “Spatial Awareness,” a special kind of wisdom.
• If you can find your ship and your rack and wake up the next morning with your last remembrance being ordering another ladies drink for a rather chunky, no downright fat LBFM, then your survival wisdom is great, your wisdom for selecting LBFM’s needs some tweaking.
• If at age fifty-five, sixty-four, or- seventy-two you still think you can handle the young hotties that hold the spotlight on the Oriental Beauties Facebook Group, you ain’t learned a damn thing, you’re old and delusional.
• If you think you can still drink till four in the morning, pass out for two hours and then function the next day, you ain’t wised up a bit, and your memory is going. Think back to the last hangover.
• If you think you can cure a hangover with alcohol, you are partially right. You can postpone it for a later attempt at a cure. You have gained a little wisdom from experience.

That’s as far as I am going with this. Let’s face it! You are an Asia Sailor! You are old! When it comes to your rating and profession, you are the wise one that others seek out for your knowledge and expertise. You have become wiser as you grew older.

When it comes to liberty, you ain’t got a fucking lick of sense. You still have all the wisdom of a seventeen-year-old Seaman Deuce.