Wisdom – Ability to discern inner qualities and relationships.
Webster’s Dictionary
Having the audacity to claim wisdom as my destination, I went on a search this week for the essence of what I am embracing. Shouldn’t wisdom be the one quality that elders should be able to claim? Isn’t it happening everywhere, spontaneously? Don’t we want to grow wiser to make good use of life’s final years? A Chasidic idiom asserts that, “for the ignorant, old age is winter, for the learned, it is a harvest.”
As far as I can tell, the one quality that brings us wisdom is our ability to reflect on our life and examine experience. We cannot help but become wise if we use life to grasp the way of the world and our place in it. How do we do this? We do it through hard knocks, depression, pleasure, boredom, anxiety, tears and laughter to name a few. Wisdom is what life gives us with every passing moment. All we need to do is PAY ATTENTION. When you find yourself going back over things that have happened, things you might have done or said differently, deciding how you will act in the future, you are developing wisdom. Well I can claim this definition. I adore reflection!
Jung believed that aging people “should know that their lives are not mounting and expanding, but that there are inexorable inner processes that enforce the contraction of life.” This contraction can bring on a period of depression. When it arrived in my life I realized very soon that the distress was a call to reflection and change. I chose not to ignore or repress my discomfort. The real physical and social losses are being mourned and digested and I have come to know a new set of strengths to value and desire.
Theodore Roszak in America The Wise says, “wisdom needs to be midwifed and given the courage to speak of what it knows.” Some of the wisdom that is gained through life flies in the face of our youth obsessed, narcissistic culture. My capacity to “discern inner qualities and relationships” is growing. The bigger picture reveals that accumulating possessions and needing to have control limits the depth of meaning and satisfaction to be experienced in life. The questions that are now being held in my heart are how do I reflect this learning (wisdom) back into the culture I am part of? I am aware of the social impact that so many conscious older women will be having as our numbers grow. What an exciting time to be alive.
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