Week 102: Acknowledging Wisdom

I spent a recent Saturday visiting the 92-year-old father of a friend for his birthday. His girlfriend is 91, and they are a continuing source of inspiration for me. Both are alert mentally, live independently, and are still active in their everyday lives. As I sat with them that day, I marveled at the amount of experience that goes into 91 or 92 years of living, and of the wisdom that arises as a result of all those years of meeting the inevitable challenges of everyday life. And now, even as they struggle with inevitable physical decline and discomfort, they continue to be philosophical about what life brings their way.

Sitting across from them at lunch, watching them relish a meal together and laugh over memories of meals shared in the past, I wondered about how our culture seems to have lost an opportunity to admire and cultivate the wisdom of our elders, and I wondered about our own wisdom – those insights, ways of being, changes we make in ourselves as a result of experience, of some time spent living life.

All too often, we focus on the suffering side of struggle and challenge, without taking the time to recognize what we’re learning that, later, becomes wisdom. Each and every one of us has a store of wisdom that emerges from our experience. Whenever I present at a conference, I am keenly aware that all the people gathered there bring with them a store of wisdom that far exceeds anything we can carry as individuals. Knowing that there is wisdom available all around us allows us to have a resource that we can actively engage if we take the time to do so. Also, when we are able to acknowledge the wisdom in others, we can also acknowledge it in ourselves. All of us have deepened into wisdom we can draw on for ourselves and can share with others, if we will remember to do so.

For this week’s experiment, I invite you to pay attention to aspects of your life where you can identify wisdom in you, an awareness of understandings and capabilities you have gleaned from the mere fact of having been alive for a given amount of time and having experienced a variety of life’s challenges and endeavors. Allow yourself to acknowledge and respect this wisdom in you. It has emerged in the only way wisdom can – through having lived. Each day offers new opportunities to deepen wisdom; each challenge brings it’s own gifts of new discoveries and skills. As you move through the week, the invitation is to focus your awareness on the wisdom you carry within you. The experiment also offers an opportunity to more actively notice the wisdom in the people around you.

As with all the experiments, allow yourself to have curiosity as your companion. The point of the experiment isn’t to judge or evaluate what you’ve learned or how you’ve moved through challenges. Instead, it’s to recognize and honor what you’ve learned, regardless of how the experience ultimately resolved itself. There is so much we can share with ourselves and with others, if we pay attention to what life teaches us along the way. Even when we’re the least skillful and “elegant” in our responses to life’s challenges, we learn something – how to do it better next time, what we don’t want to do again, what feels bad, what feels good. Wisdom is the gift of experience. Embrace it and notice how that is for you.

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