What is wisdom? When I look it up in the dictionary I get a woefully inadequate definition: Having the quality of being wise. Now that is completely useless! Let’s try the next line: Knowledge of what is true and right coupled with just judgment as to action. Again useless as truth, righteousness, and justice are entirely culturally defined. Truth is a perspective, as no human is able to see all sides of anything. What is ‘right’ really means what best serves those making that judgment. What constitutes justice is a rabbit hole I don’t even want to get close to poking a toe into. Definitions 2,3, and 4 are beyond useless as they refer to wise sayings, wise actions, and scholarly knowledge. So I am going to propose a different definition.
Wisdom: a functional relationship to ‘what is‘ based on the appreciation of ‘what is.’
The idea of ‘what is‘ refers to something you can experience in some way. It exists in the here and now and is a part of what we believe to be reality. That would mean there is no such thing as wisdom about the afterlife or the social structure of alien life on another planet or anything else you can not experience directly. Wisdom comes from the distillation of many trial-and-error personal experiences with something. Wisdom is figuring out how to make a functional relationship with that something. Wisdom is about how to get your needs met from a relationship with something in the long run. Sustainability is a hallmark of wisdom. It stands the test of time. That is why appreciation is key to wisdom. You can’t sustain a long-term relationship with something if you do not appreciate it. To appreciate you have to take in the ‘what is‘ in all its manifestations over time without preconception or judgment. This quality is why I love science. To be a real scientist you have to see what you are studying without silly judgments like good or bad, right or wrong. Everything just simply is what it is and your goal is simply to observe it and hopefully understand it enough to appreciate its relationship to your life.
I display my own personal bias here. I grew up a scientist. I study things with curiosity and trial and error. My basic motto is “I don’t know, show me.” I can’t afford to have judgments as they block the ability to see what is right now. Judgments provoke the need for action. Think about the last group conversation you were in. If you felt the need to say something (an action), how well were you able to hear and consider what the other people were saying? Contemplation and action are mutually exclusive in the human brain. Basically, you can not hear and speak (or plan to speak) at the same time. It is like trying to hear what two people are saying at the same time. True scientist trains themselves to spend their time listening, watching, feeling, engaging as many senses for information input as possible, and then contemplating that total input before coming up with an output to challenge what they are studying to see if a different response occurs. This is the trial and error process used to seek a wider appreciation of what is being studied.
Okay, why this sudden interest in the nature of wisdom? Such interests are usually triggered by some encounter with life that left me bemused. In this case, it was hearing about a couple having trouble with their post-teen child acting like a preteen. My usual response to parents when they start having trouble with their kids, usually as they enter their teen years, is that they are supposed to have trouble. Part of the growing-up process is when the child starts seeking the wisdom of how to participate well with life. This requires personal experiences of what works and what does not work. The protective parent wants to save their child from having to experience the pain and suffering of all the ‘error’ experiences. The example that came to mind at the time was how many parents have told their children not to touch the hot stove. Don’t touch that stove, it’s hot and it will burn you! And yet how often does the child touch the stove anyway? I suspect every time! Why is that? The why is because the words hot and burn mean nothing to a child that has not experienced them yet. They get it that you do not want them to touch the stove for some reason, but until they experience the why for themselves, the warning means nothing. The parents have the wisdom built out of their own experience of why to not touch the hot stove. The child does not.
This insight resulted in me formulating a new hypothesis about life: You can not share your wisdom with others and expect them to act as if they now have that same wisdom. Wisdom is built out of personal experience. It is not built out of hearing someone else’s experience. Intuitively, teens will resist listening to your wisdom because they know on some level that they have to figure these things out for themselves. They have to have a variety of experiences, trial, and error in order to create their own path to a functional relationship with ‘what is‘. I believe this is one of the major conflicts between parents and children that are typical of the teen years. The parents think the children are just being willful and irresponsible because they are not doing things the way the parents tell them to. The children are not accepting their parents’ wisdom. Well hello! Wisdom does not work that way. As a parent, you can not force your experience of a life of hard knocks on your child and expect them to respond to life as though they had lived your life. They have to have their own hard knocks. They have to develop their own wisdom.
This basic conflict of growing up is also played out on a societal level. Those of us that identifies with the parent position now take on a generalized parental posture with all life. They call us co-dependents. We want to spare others the experience of pain and suffering. We seek out others that appear to be suffering and try to save them, generally by telling them how to do things the ‘right‘ way. If you try this with a healthy mature person, they will tell you to get lost, usually in colorful language. But as clever co-dependents, we are wise enough to pick out folks that are still learning their wisdom and need physical support in this process, much like teenagers. They gladly pretend to accept our wisdom as long as it comes wrapped in physical support – money, housing, food, clothing, transportation, whatever as long as it is free. It is kind of like the indigents that go listen to the sermon at the gospel mission in order to get the free meal at the end. I feel the parents that started my contemplation of this had been giving their post-teen a few too many free meals and were now getting it that the child had no intention of accepting their wisdom and living their life the way the parents wanted. I know from my endless years as a co-dependent that after a while I start getting angry about this. After all these years of preaching, they should be converted by now and living their life the way I have told them to. Clearly, they are ungrateful blankety blanks.
Eventually, I had to figure out that my anger was really about me not getting my desire for gratitude and approval met. Their failure to swallow my wisdom whole without their own confirmatory experience felt to me like a lack of respect for my wisdom. In truth, I was the one not seeing how reality actually works. I was wanting something that was not available. Once I saw that I had to ask why did I want that gratitude and approval so badly? Years of asking that question made me understand that I was trying to fix an inner feeling of lack with outer approval. I wanted to fill an inner lack of love for myself with an outer love from someone else. Said out loud it sounds like it came off the back of a box of cereal. So what does it mean really? Love is the desire and willingness to positively participate. A lack of love for myself translates to a lack of desire and willingness to positively participate with some parts of life. Why life? Because we feel love for ourselves when we outflow positive participation with life. Positive participation is another way to describe wisdom. There are parts of me that have not developed the wisdom to know how to positively participate with the parts of life I need – that feed those parts of me that are still looking for expression. There! Now we see why all the sudden interest in wisdom!
The wisdom to functionally outflow positive participation with life creates the inner experience of self-love. Sounds like the whole point of life. Nuff said!
Take care,
David