Kindness, learning from age.

Age is a bit like wine: it accentuates the essences. In the same way that maturation enhances the personality of the wine, age accentuates the personality traits. The virtues and the flaws seem to increase: who is good becomes better, but who is bad, becomes worse.

The goal of years, although not always clear, is to make us better people. People capable of overcoming flaws, hurts, grudges, sorrows and mistakes. People capable of learning from the pains and losses and transforming ways, not always easy ways, into kindness.

This learning is visible in some people who are in the third or fourth age, who have reached their inner balance and show a natural propensity for serenity and well-being. People with an easy smile, who cultivate kindness and the respect for others.

They keep on using words that are becoming less used with every passing day: please, thank you, excuse me. They are the remnants of a distant education, when the starting point for any relationship - even the most superficial - was the recognition that our freedom exists only if we respect the other’s freedom. A principle that shows us how we are all interconnected by an invisible umbilical cord.

These people are from a time when we lived more slowly, and everything had a more intense flavor. From a time full of small elegant gestures: holding a door for a woman to pass; greeting our neighbors - good morning, good afternoon, how are you; to ask permission for almost everything in return for practically nothing ...

A long list of details that have been deleted - swallowed by modernity, and resist only in their memory and the behavior they repeated stubbornly to fight the invasion of vulgarity.

They remind us of civility with your smooth gestures, polished by the years. They do not fret when they walk down the street and someone – stronger – passes by them unexpectedly, forcing them to leave the sidewalk, and they move away gently to preserve their fragile bodies.

They do not complain when someone – faster – enters theelevator and grossly ignores them, leaving them outside, waiting for the elevator to come back down.

They do not complain when someone – younger – passes in front of them at the grocery store’s queue, or the bank’s or pharmacy’s (despite having priority), and leaves behind, struggling to steady their tired legs.

They do not bother when someone – rude and uneducated – ignites the speech, do not say “please” or “thank you”, and talk to them using a condescending arrogance, confounding the wisdom of age with disability.

They do not grumble when someone – too eager (or foolish) – treats them impatiently, trying to hurry them while they remain faithful to a slower time, a time that they preserve within themselves and brings them closer to the divine.

And they forgive! They forgive the incivilities and the arrogance. They forgive the unwillingness to the moodiness. They forgive the coarseness and the roughness. They forgive the lack of education and the ignorance. And above all that – they also forgive evil!

They belong to a place that is above the fierce hustle of daily life. They are beyond: at the top of their age, their wisdom, their kindness.

They know the ebb and flow of life, the ups and downs - the capricious twists of fate. They know that we will get to where they are now; it is the inevitability of the human course.

We will all be old one day, and most people will be rude and grumpy, that did not learn anything in life, and as with some wine they will become sour and unpalatable. But some will be gentle and serene, like a fine wine that has matured quietly, smoothly, revealing in its bouquet all its origin and course.

We must not forget that what we sow now – how we treat others – will be what we will receive in the future!