What wisdom isn't

Wisdom isn't an 80 year-old telling you to follow your bliss. In the words of Henry Alford whose book I'm reading - ‘How to Live':

‘To read eighty interviews (of old people) given by primarily affluent white Americans is to have the prescription "Do something that you love" beaten into your head until you're ready to maim a small animal."

Just so you don't go on thinking Henry is an old person hater, his book is entirely about his affection for the wisdom that can come from older folks - but not just every older folk.  Henry goes on to tell the story about how hard it was to define the word and how many of the people he had thought were wise, really didn't have much to say.  Many people lived what we might call wise lives, but couldn't talk about it.

This is the why the media should never ask an artist, movie producer, actress or architect about his ‘art'.  In my past life (not the Shirley McClain sort of past life) I was an architect and I dutifully listened to recordings of some of my heroes talk about their work.  Frank Lloyd Wright for example.  For a while there he was quite a media figure - but what he said was entirely not understandable - picture George Bush dressed up as Frank Wright, telling you about how to design a house and you'll get the picture.

In my second or third mid-life crisis I went through a rather intense reading of all things religious and mythic, looking for something that might let me know that despite evidence to the contrary, everything was going to be okay.  I'd actually live forever in some form and when I died, whole choruses would ring out across the heavens, shooting stars would flash in a Walt Disney sort of way, and my family would pause each time my name came up in conversation.  Well, sad to state, all my searching did for me was to make my wife sigh when she realized I was about to tell her another Buddhist story, and turn me further into being an agnostic (apologies to others).  On the upside it did start me thinking about my next writing project ‘A Bible For The Rest of Us'.  A book for those of us that take comfort from stories, just not the mythical ones.

What I did discover however, was that wisdom, or what passes for it, means different things to different people, changes over time, and can come from anyone no matter what age.  What wisdom is not is much easier; it's not believing in an idea so much that you stop thinking - again GW and the Iraq war - he really believed in what he was doing, he just hadn't thought about it.

I'll leave you with about the only thing that stuck with me after about 40 or 50 books on religion, Buddhism and scary survival stories.  It's vaguely Buddhist - and my apologies to him who would cringe (and laugh) at my retelling of the ‘three difficulties.'

We should all do three things:

1.  Know that we all screw up regularly.   And that we all have a pretty good idea when we screw up (treat people badly, obsess about something, worry too much etc.)
2.  Next time you screw up do something different to break the habit - anything, break into song, tell a joke whatever, and
3.  Remember the first two.