If you want to see wisdom and maturity in action, look for someone (or a community) investing in infrastructure before it’s too late.
Part of what makes my part of the country so lovely is that the trains work, the water is clean and the health department inspects restaurants.
But for the last fifty years, around the world, few communities have invested enough to maintain the systems they were smart enough to build. Now, my block loses power for days at a time after a storm… And it’s far more dire elsewhere.
In our personal lives, we can coast on a particular credential or bit of knowledge for years. And then one day, we realize we’re obsolete. The idea is the same:
We need to plant our trees before we want the shade, and fix our systems before they break.