...Who has much to be modest about. Attributed to Winston Churchill, allegedly speaking about Clement Attlee, his wartime Deputy and postwar successor. Quite a put down, but my brain being the odd shape that it is, was twisting it about a bit and set me wondering if that might not be a good thing, ultimately.
I have long had my own little theory (which I may have unconsciously plagiarised from somewhere, I really don't know) that we all spend our youth "growing up" and becoming more and more convinced that we know everything, only, if we are fortunate, to spend our adult years learning just how wrong we were. Perhaps we reach a stage where we doubt everything and know nothing... I don't have a problem with that.
Doubt is good.
Questions and the journey to try to answer them, which inevitably leads to more questions - unless you are intellectually moribund perhaps - is the joy of life in my view. And I know that I have been at stages where I have reached that point of mental rigor mortis - the darkest times, the most terrifying places in my mental landscape. Slowly, though, the way back from there has become apparent and I have gradually freed the rusted gears in the me machine, I know that I am not as mentally agile as I was back in the day, when I managed to persuade a certain seaside academic institution that I deserved a receipt for the mental effort that I had spent there.
Now though, that thought doesn't bother me as much as it did, because I have got my hunger and curiosity back, along with the humility (I hope) to realise that I can learn from anyone that I meet. Particularly from a certain small boy who, like all of his kind can reflect our conceits and self-deceit and show us how ridiculous we are sometimes.
I think that we need to recover some of our childlike qualities, stop trying to be so smart and so full of our own importance - and find as much as we can to be modest about
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