When I was younger, I was far more likely to have an answer than a question. Older people spoke, offered advice, and repeated stories I had already heard, while I believed I understood enough. I had my plans, my time, and my conviction that the life ahead of me had little to learn from the lives they had already lived.
Today, after so many years, I find myself thinking more and more about conversations I did not give enough attention to. About sentences I only half listened to, advice I considered outdated, and stories that seemed like unnecessary repetition at the time. I did not understand that a person sometimes repeats the same story not because they have nothing else to say, but because something remains in that story that, even after all those years, they have never managed to forget.
Now I would listen to some of those stories differently.
I would not rush to say that I understood. I would not move on to another subject so quickly. I would ask how they knew what decision to make when they did not have enough money, how they endured injustices they could not put right, what it cost them to leave unspoken something that hurt them, and whether they ever wished they had been more selfish towards the world and more considerate towards themselves.
I would also ask about things they had probably never spoken of. Were they happy? What were they afraid of? Did they ever feel lonely while everyone around them believed they were strong enough to carry everything? Did they have dreams they set aside because other people’s needs always came before their own?
Because only now do I understand how little we actually know about the people who raised us.
We know them as parents and grandparents, as people who worked, cared, waited, and helped. But we rarely ask what they were like before we became part of their lives. What they wanted for themselves, what they lost, why they cried when no one was watching, and how many times they had to give up something that mattered to them.
For years, we see them through what they were to us, and far less often through what they were to themselves.
Perhaps that is one of our greatest oversights.
Today, we have access to almost unlimited knowledge. We read books about leadership, relationships, emotional intelligence, parenting, and life decisions. We listen to people explain how to cope with failure, set boundaries, preserve our dignity, and live with the consequences of our choices.
I have nothing against that. On the contrary, I have learned a great deal by reading and listening to people who put their knowledge into books.
But increasingly, I think about how many of those same things I could have learned much earlier, at an ordinary table, from people who did not know the modern terms for what they had already lived through.
Perhaps they could not explain emotional intelligence, but they knew how deeply one poorly chosen word could hurt a person. They did not speak about crisis management, but they made decisions that determined whether their family would have enough for the following month. They did not give lectures on responsibility, but they knew very well the mornings when you have to get up and do what is expected of you, regardless of how you feel.
I do not mean that older generations were wiser in everything. They were not. They too made mistakes, made poor decisions, stayed silent when they should have spoken, and spoke when perhaps it would have been better to stay silent.
But today, their mistakes seem just as worthy of my attention as their successes.
Because I would no longer seek only advice on how to do something. I would want to understand why they did certain things in precisely the way they did.
That is the difference between the years when we believe we have enough time and the years when we begin to understand its value.
When we are younger, we often put off a conversation with older people until another day. There is always something more urgent. Work, an obligation, a phone call, a meeting, or simply the need to be somewhere else. We believe there will be another opportunity. That we will sit down again, hear the same story again, and perhaps one day ask a question that had not even occurred to us then.
But time does not always leave us the chance to return.
One day, we may long to hear the very story we once interrupted with the words: “I know, you’ve told me.”
We want to ask an ordinary question about a decision, a family event, or a year we never talked about enough. Only then do we realise that the answer is not written down anywhere. It is not in a book, on the internet, or among the photographs we have kept.
It existed in someone’s memory.
And we did not know to ask.
Still, I do not think this text should be only a story about missed conversations. Even less do I want it to become another reason to condemn ourselves for something we did not know how to do better at the time.
What we can still do matters far more.
If our parents are still here, we can ask them something we have never asked before. If we have a grandmother or grandfather, we can ask them to tell us a story we already know again. We can sit with an older person without constantly looking at the clock and without believing that every conversation has to teach us something useful.
Perhaps only then will we hear what they have been trying to tell us for years.
Or perhaps we will understand for the first time that the person sitting across from us is not simply someone who belongs to our past. They are an entire life about which we know far less than we think.
Today, I wish I had understood earlier how valuable those conversations are. Not because I believe they would have helped me avoid all my mistakes, but because I would have better understood the people who, before me, had to make decisions with far fewer possibilities than I have today.
Perhaps I would have been more patient. Perhaps I would have judged less. Perhaps I would have seen differently some of their actions that I did not understand at the time.
Or perhaps I would simply have told them more often that I wanted to hear them.
There are books we can return to whenever we wish. There are lectures we can listen to again and pages we can open after many years.
But there are also conversations that cannot be repeated.
Perhaps the saddest thing is not that one day we are left without the people who could have answered us.
The saddest thing is that, while they were here, we often had time to listen to them, but did not know how precious that time was.
So, while we still have someone to ask, let us not wait for life to explain the value of an answer.
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