Oct 19 2021 - Old Enough to ...

 

Yesterday's "race to stop aging" topic got me wondering about how we view age.  What came up?  The expressions old enough and too old.  I consider old enough to be a question about maturity.  My view is philosophical.  It is much more practical than that. How old is old enough?  Google answers:  the answer, generally, is 18 -  the age when the United States, and the rest of the world, considers young people capable of accepting responsibility for their actions... The NYTimes article that this is excerpted from is about whether children should be sentenced to life imprisonment for crimes that don't involve murder. That was in 2009.  In 2012, Australia's version of the question was:  How old is old enough to be a criminal? "Every year, hundreds of children younger than 13 sit inside Australian juvenile detention centres. They aren’t old enough to drive a car. Yet the justice system has set them on a criminal pathway that sends the vast majority into adult prisons. We explore the case for raising the minimum age of criminal responsibility." This is very harsh, isn't it?  That the answer to old enough is about crime and punishment. The other subjects pale in comparison - and relate to parents more than children.  How old is old enough - to be home alone, to go to school, play alone outside, watching their younger sibling, and so on.  But then adults are writing all the articles, so the perspective of a child is mostly absent.   Let's look at the opposite end of the spectrum - How old is too old?  Journalists ask this question: Is the Presidency the wrong job for someone over seventy? Should people be in the workforce after sixty-five? This is far more fun.  You can calculate how old is too old to have children, to buy a piano, to buy a used car, to date a person, to date at all, to have a hip or knee operation,  to be a lifeguard.  Lots of advice on scattered topics organized by age.   There's even this question:  When are you too old to die young?  Of course, Quora has answers for this.  They are so full of answers over at Quora. This is another image with the overlay of the Plaid City pattern.  It doesn't fit the series, but has great texture.

Winter Water

While I was at Humber Nurseries last week, I visited the wintering Koi in their water tanks.  Here are a few abstracts from that visit.