Do you consider yourself wise?
Most of us don’t. Yet,
you undoubtedly have cultivated your own ‘hand-made wisdom’, just as Beth, Carrie, and Denise (participant pseudonyms) did in my doctoral study. If you have lived through challenges, change, loss, grief, trauma, struggle, mental health challenges or any of the curves and difficulties that life can include i.e. been human, then you’ve had to cultivate your own “hand-made” wisdom for getting by.
It’s just that wisdom is something we tend not to recognize in ourselves. Denise in the research interview observed:
“Sometimes, you’re so close to it, you don’t see it”.
Finding wisdom through anything life throws at us is not only possible but is also one of our greatest strengths and capacities as human beings.
This means that through loss, bereavement, trauma, cancer, chronic illness, anxiety, depression, or life altering crises we can gain our own unique life wisdom “on the journey you did not want” and “on the road without a map” (Beth and Carrie, doctoral study). This may not feel very comforting at the time, but, the forging of our own wisdom-compass becomes something that nothing and no-one can take away. From any hardship or shattering, it’s ours to keep.
With this deep inner wisdom that quietly grows within us throughout our lives, almost invisibly to ourselves, it then in turn feeds others – our children, friends, colleagues, even a random stranger on a train ride.
Sometimes the wisdom forged within us through our journey is just felt in a wordless but deeply caring silence, or it shows up in a wise word in a crucial moment, or in a courageous act without a second thought… or when the second thought refuses to stop us anyway.
You’ve met people you just know, as you walk away, were truly wise. It didn’t matter if they had an Oscar or not, or a President’s award, or a promotion. The way they deeply touched you when you needed that care or wise word lasts longer than any of those things would. That’s the thing with wisdom – it isn’t a ‘thing’, it’s a presence that impacts and transforms us.
So, do you consider yourself wise?
Let yourself imagine you too have been that person for someone already – because you have.
Our task in life, contrary to popular messages all around us, is not ‘freedom 60’ with the happy condo life surrounded by Healthy Aging slogans, while this is great if it works out for some. Our task, according to the sages is to become wise and leave a legacy that imprints the next generation with something they can hold onto to guide them through the challenges they will face – without us.
The wise ones have shown us that our task is to live a life that inspires hope, faith, love during the darkest of times. A wise one has dug deep through incredible heartache and suffering for the meaning and purpose of what it is to ‘be human’ and, who has held onto a vision of community in humanity even when it seems most darkly and terrifyingly absent.
A wise one steadfastly embodies care, kindness, love, compassion, truth, and justice in their living even when it costs absolutely everything. Can we be these people right now? Looking around us it seems rather glaring that our shared world needs us to be.
Big ideas, but the seeds of ‘how?’ lie deep within each of us – in the mess and stuff of our own lives.
It’s never been any other way.
My steadfast belief from living through my own life and through the many patients and clients over 20 years in my health care practice is that there is indeed, a wise-way through anything.
Those of you who know more of my journey in recent years can imagine what it means to still be able to write these words. I still believe it, and glimpse something deeper and more real about this statement than ever before.
Ironically, as I’ve said and witnessed many times, it does not give me that feeling of blissful zen or beatified peace. There are many days and more nights I wish it did.
No. I’ve come to realize wisdom is something else entirely.
Wisdom is more like a sage nod and a wish to not inflict the journey on anyone if they can possibly avoid wisdom’s forge if they don’t have to endure it. But that would involve escaping from life altogether, which only has one route, utterly irrevocable and no do over. Wisdom begins now and only ever now. Time alone does not bring wisdom, while it certainly forms part of wisdom’s crucible.
Wisdom seems to have more to do with tender roots of something new growing somewhere deep down, felt, barely seen but nonetheless there, and most visible perhaps, after we are gone and the effects of our lives are gathered up by those who loved us and those who will be left with our impact.
What’s been the hardest to remember is that what I’ve witnessed in others can also be true for myself.
That seems to be the point about wisdom – we just never ever see it easily or clearly in ourselves. Yet, it forms within us nonetheless. Wisdom in one sense, will have its way with us and force us into ever deepening spirals within to find wisdom’s invisible, ungraspable presence and guidance forged through hard won experience.
This was what Beth, Carrie and Denise conveyed in their interviews for my study, while each of them at the outset of their first interview stated, “I don’t really see myself as wise”.
So, you are not alone if that is how you feel too.
Wisdom-forging…
Life’s recipe for ‘wisdom-forging’ is relatively simple yet it seems to be one of the hardest things for us to trust as human beings. It’s rather akin to what a piece of iron goes through in a forge. Heat, pressure, plunging into the depths and out again, no small amount of battering and hammering by life, forges somehow, slowly, a sharply honed insight of clear-seeing, a compassionate non-attachment to what one used to feel so terribly attached to (identity, success, spiritual this or that, career, family…) and the slow dawning realization that what the sages hint at is more true than we ever realized.
Life really is about something entirely ungraspable by the mind. Some other part of us has to awaken to realize and touch into what that is. I’m not being original here. That’s the thesis of many past and present. But, oh my, living this, truly knowing this and then…. harder even yet, trusting and accepting this, this is the task that wisdom sets us in a lifetime.
And we cannot do it alone. Repeat. We cannot do it alone.
Finding a wise way through a seemingly insurmountable situation/loss/trauma/difficult/decision takes patience with ourselves and with the process. It is imperative to lean into wise, loving friends, find a good therapist that fits for us, have huge doses of compassion for ourselves with endless acts of kindness to our precious being, our body, our mind and heart for our mistakes, failings, ineptness, struggle. It takes trust that a way can be found, trust that compassion to oneself will become in a natural outflow, a deep compassion for the other, and that compassion with ourselves does make a global difference. It takes an unshakeable hope that one drop in the pond does change the whole pond.
Our drop makes a difference.
Wisdom forms almost imperceptibly in lots of quiet reflection, long walks in nature’s medicine, or in long grief stricken staring at the ocean or trees, and on good days – some big splashes of fun and playfulness to forget our search altogether so that eventually… we discover that we have clawed out from our travails and valleys on our life path – the wisdom-gold that no-one and nothing can take away from us has formed.
Wisdom’s way is not like this world’s addiction to straight highways, fast tracks, visible rewards and ‘self-betterment’. It is more to do releasing expectations and taking a good look, compassionately, at ‘what is’ and discerning our place in things as they are happening.
Take heart and be kind to you!
In the dark valleys of our lives it takes a rigour of kindness with ourselves to come to a deep self-compassion that treats our own hearts and beings with the acts and words of support that we would offer a loved one.
With mindful awareness, self-compassion, and attunement to our soul’s whisperings in dreams, feelings and intuitions, we can move through the rapids with an eye on hope and an unshakeable determination. When we trust our deep wise self to find our way… somehow, we can relax into ourselves a little, be present with ourselves, present with the moment, and present with others who care. Then the way through can open up to us.
This is the focus that undergirds my practice philosophy as well as my own life and parenting thanks to my own wise mentors, therapists and guides over the years:
There is a wise way through anything. Together, we find it.
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I wish you deep renewal this year and hope to see you at the February mid-winter retreat.
PS. Be kind to yourself!