Time is our biggest enemy and mentor. If we are fortunate to live long enough, our bodies age and hinder us, while our minds get smarter with the experiences we went through. As Benjamin Franklin said “At 20 years of age, the will reigns; at 30, the wit and at 40, the judgment.”, we start to live life differently as time goes on. As soon as we are born, we start getting experience, we never stop learning and we never stop changing. That is the process of growing. This quote explains the process a little bit.

    ”At 20 years of age will reigns . . .” What is the meaning of will in this phrase? We can say it is the needs of our bodies that wills us to do what we do in life or we can interpret it as the will to achieve our dreams. Whatever meaning we get from it, there is still one thing holding true and it is that we go in blind. Doing things for the first time might be fun, but the most important factor is that we make many mistakes in the progression of time. If we manage to learn from them, we grow and by the time we hit our 30’s things start to change.

    When hit our 30’s we start to find jumping in blind to be a bad method to achieve our goal. After all we suffered a lot by fueling desire with will alone, and found that causes more problems than it solves. We now have the skills and competencies to achieve our needs and goals instead of just will. We think our new approach will give us much needed happiness. But we are still lacking as we think this happiness comes to us through material possessions or temporary relief caused by tackling harder problems. This does not hold true for long though.

    We change again when we get around 40 years old. Our wisdom starts to flourish. We have lived enough to realize how society, jobs and our bodies work. We have lived through so much that when we see something, we have enough experience to realize what is going to happen next. When we look back, we see how foolish we were and how naïve our approach was to solve our problems. When faced with a problem, we now have the ability and “confidence” to solve it easily based on our wisdom and experience. Most importantly, after understanding that we cannot beat time and stay alive forever, we now know that the true happiness was with us all along, we just had to look for it. Our focus turns from material gains to our bonds, having fulfilling memories and meaningful work that makes a positive impact in the world.

    While am still young I can confidently say that I believe these words to be correct. Even when culture and life styles change, fundamentals of humans stay the same. We will be young and adventurous, we will grow to be smarter, but still dream of material possessions and lastly, we will grow to be aware of ourselves and our world. I believe that was why Franklin said those words.