Aging & Wisdom Quote by William McFee

McFee frames thinking as cultivation, not inspection: the mind as a garden where constant “rooting up” kills what it claims to measure. The line works because it’s both tender and faintly scolding, aimed at the anxious young striver who confuses self-awareness with progress. “Must” is doing heavy moral labor here. This isn’t a helpful suggestion; it’s a corrective to a modern temperament already emerging in McFee’s era: the compulsion to audit the self, to demand visible returns on every hour spent reading, writing, believing.

The metaphor is slyly physical. Ideas have roots: they take hold underground, in half-conscious associations, in time spent living rather than performing intelligence. To “let” them grow implies restraint and patience, a willingness to tolerate ambiguity while a thought matures. The alternative is a kind of intellectual micromanagement - yanking up seedlings for a progress report - which damages the very thing you’re trying to build. It’s also a critique of premature skepticism: the habit of disproving your own instincts before they’ve had a chance to become coherent.

Context matters: McFee wrote out of a world of apprenticeship, long voyages, and slow accumulation of skill and perspective. Against that backdrop, the quote reads as advice for formation rather than optimization. The subtext is that youth is uniquely vulnerable to impatience and performance anxiety, and that genuine originality often requires time untracked by metrics. He’s warning that constant self-interrogation can become a disguised form of fear: if you never let an idea settle, you never have to commit to it.