Wisdom

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Have you acquired any, yet? What is it? Don't be afeared if it sounds trite, so long as it has proved its worth through the fires of your experience. And don't feel as if you need to sum up all your wisdom in one magnum opus. Just give us one taste of it. We all could benefit from the sound precepts you've sifted out of the shitstorm of just living.

I know in advance that far too many ILXors are far too young to believe in their own wisdom, and too callow to allow the rest of us to have any (since that would in some small way invalidate them for not having any of their own), so that their inevitable response will be to derail this thread as rapidly and decisively as possible with swarms of inanities they hope will be amusing enough to disguise how uneasy this whole subject makes them feel.

Humor me on this one. I'll start.

One small piece of wisdom I have to offer is that, of all the obvious and useful virtues, I find courage to be the most valuable. You can't love anyone or anything without it. In fact, you can't even get started. And no matter how much you love life, it is bound to present you with gut-testing failures and setbacks. It is precisely then when you need to summon your courage, and for as long as you lose your courage under those circumstances, for just that long you will be lost, sunk and dismayed by every task in front of you - dead in the water. That's when you need to push on, right into the teeth of your fears, and do what seems right, no matter how grim or how bleak you feel. There won't be any applause. There won't be a fat bonus check in an envelope. All you'll get is another chance. Which beats out having no chance at all. In the end it is usually enough to pull you through.

PS. Apparently, Dan Rather thought this way, too. Hence, his much-maligned sign-off phrase back in the 1980s: "Courage." It didn't work, of course, but his heart was in the right place.

― Aimless, Saturday, 3 March 2007 19:59 (nineteen years ago)

Don't worry that the blanket will be pulled out from under you at any random moment.

There aren't secret handshakes for getting into higher ed or anything intimidating. Getting jobs or whatnot.

― Abbott, Saturday, 3 March 2007 20:23 (nineteen years ago)

Lots of things (feelings, troubles, good or bad luck) are really fleeting, and the wisdom i am partway toward gaining involves realizing that and not essentializing and acting as though they are permament. (intellectual understanding of wisdom, and living it out really, are so widely separated! but i think you don't really have the first until you have the second.)

― Maria, Saturday, 3 March 2007 21:06 (nineteen years ago)

Yes, that is hard when you first get those feelings at young age bcz so little life experience leads you to belive you will be stuck in that hell internally.

― Abbott, Saturday, 3 March 2007 21:22 (nineteen years ago)

One of the most important things I've learned is that things really do get worse, not better. Getting older (ie 'middle age') is no fun at all, and from my observations of people even older than me I can well believe that it's going to get a lot, lot worse. I mean, I have no wish to cope with not being able to walk properly or being regarded as physically revolting by younger folk, or getting 'through' my last, fatal illness when it comes.

The above remarks about courage ring true but, again, I find I'm shorter and shorter of it (courage) as I get older.

― dubmill, Saturday, 3 March 2007 21:34 (nineteen years ago)

Wow, that's...not quite what I was thinking. Although the more I think about wisdom, the less I want to talk about, you know? Maybe this is just because I hate to hear myself sounding like a giant hippie, or maybe because my thoughts are still percolating and not ready to serve yet. I think they may just keep percolating forever, though, which seems about right.

― Laurel, Saturday, 3 March 2007 21:37 (nineteen years ago)

Getting older (ie 'middle age') is no fun at all

Aging is mandatory. If its fun you want, you need to get bent. Or twisted. But in a good way, you know.

― Aimless, Saturday, 3 March 2007 21:47 (nineteen years ago)

One thing does come to mind, something someone said to me last year: Love is a better way. Even for the disagreeable things, love + distance or love + (hopefully, amused) tolerance, or love + disassociation have all been very helpful ways to deal with people & things that would otherwise not be loveable (or even tolerable). Prob keeping my blood pressure down as well.

Helpful for me to think of always acting in love and honor, and to put my energies into SUPPORTING positive things rather than OPPOSING negative ones. It just enables a more gracious daily life, I find.

― Laurel, Saturday, 3 March 2007 21:48 (nineteen years ago)

My favourite mantra that's kept me going has always been "this too will pass".

And it does. It always does.

― Trayce, Saturday, 3 March 2007 23:43 (nineteen years ago)

Also, when you're older you won't neccesarily feel "grown up". You'll still feel lost and confused like you did at 18. You'll sometimes feel like you're faking being adult and someone's going to go AH-HA! at any given moment. I don't know if that ever goes away, but I'm learning to have more confidence in my experience.

― Trayce, Saturday, 3 March 2007 23:45 (nineteen years ago)

leave it to trayce to make even the words of king solomon thud artlessly

― and what, Sunday, 4 March 2007 00:05 (nineteen years ago)

How strange. I read Trayce's words and did not detect any thuddingness. I must be going deef. Or something.

― Aimless, Sunday, 4 March 2007 00:17 (nineteen years ago)

Ethan I am getting seriously sick of you insulting every random thing I say, you utterly worthless pile of dogshit. I really wish you would just die, and I don't wish that on anyone, so congratulations. Maybe one day you'll actually grow up and find someone to love.

― Trayce, Sunday, 4 March 2007 00:29 (nineteen years ago)

Though I feel really sorry for whoever that ends up being.

― Trayce, Sunday, 4 March 2007 00:30 (nineteen years ago)

Trayce, I stopped feeling like I wasn't an adult after I had been a parent for a while and I'd had to deal with a variety of crises, including the life-and-death sort, where I was needed front and center, with no way to slough it off to someone else. Once I discovered that my judgement could be relied on in such situations I decided I could stop feeling like a fraud. I never learned to like it, though. Crises suck.

― Aimless, Sunday, 4 March 2007 00:30 (nineteen years ago)

Aimless: yeah., I have often wondered if one of the great levellers is parenthood (or failing that, perhaps something like nursing a loved one who is dying or seriously injured etc). I have no intention of having children and I'm perfectly happy to admit to the fact that it is because I don't feel responsible enough to be a good parent.

― Trayce, Sunday, 4 March 2007 00:34 (nineteen years ago)

Not that I'm trying to avoid life/adultness at all, there's been plenty of other things I have had to go through that have hardened me up that I've coped with pretty well (living alone with very little money or support, for example).

― Trayce, Sunday, 4 March 2007 00:37 (nineteen years ago)

The reality of old age or extreme illness is sometimes experienced as a kind of personal humiliation, but both of these states are less helpless than infancy, with its shitting in diapers, being spoon fed, spitting up, being small, weak, hairless, able only to roll to one side or the other. But babies are naturally humble and cannot be humiliated.

Taking care of the helpless is almost as humiliating to the caregiver. Changing diapers and wiping up messes, spoon feeding them. No part of their anatomy is spared from you. There is no refuge for pride on either side of the equation, the helper or helped.

It changes you. No need to be a parent to get there. You'll get there by one road or another.

― Aimless, Sunday, 4 March 2007 00:50 (nineteen years ago)

Aye, and it is something I ponder a lot. My parents are getting on. Their parents are already at the point they need a lot of assistance (my Nan's almost blind now, but being very stubborn about it). Am I ready to step up to the plate when needed? I don't know, and that disapoints me.

― Trayce, Sunday, 4 March 2007 01:00 (nineteen years ago)

Am I ready to step up to the plate when needed? I don't know...

That information is distributed on a need-to-know basis. As soon as you need to know, you will. Chances are good you'll step up and do fine. You may not feel fine when you're in the middle of it, but in these cases actions count for more than style points.

― Aimless, Sunday, 4 March 2007 01:10 (nineteen years ago)

― moonship journey to baja, Sunday, 4 March 2007 01:16 (nineteen years ago)

No. Have you?

If so, I would be interested to know if you felt more helpless than an infant and how you arrived at that estimate. Just in the interest of keeping the discussion from straying into taking random pot-shots for no particular purpose than scoring points, you understand.

― Aimless, Sunday, 4 March 2007 02:50 (nineteen years ago)

yes. i felt as helpless an infant. i shit the hospital bed several times, had to wear diapers, couldn't eat even blended foods, couldn't sit up or stand without help. also they shaved my torso pre-op.

i just wanted to point out that a lot of people leave life as they entered it: small, weak, hairless and incontinent. not so much a pot shot as a bit of dark comedy.

― moonship journey to baja, Sunday, 4 March 2007 03:21 (nineteen years ago)

i mean, the list of things you pointed out as humiliations of infancy are basically what the terminally ill and very elderly deal with all the time.

― moonship journey to baja, Sunday, 4 March 2007 03:22 (nineteen years ago)

also ironic is that a lot of people provide those sorts of services for their infant children and then for their parents. in my mom's case she had to help me change my diapers twice: once when i was an infant and once when i was almost 30 and in the hospital. i can only imagine what that was like for her.

― moonship journey to baja, Sunday, 4 March 2007 03:25 (nineteen years ago)

Most people get diseases of some sort, they recover or they don't. All decays in the end, some parts just seem eager to jump the gun—a colon here, some nerve-sheathing there. Hope you are better, mjtb.
I have learned that I need to keep my guard up against my own self-deception. I can get carried away in the construction of a drama and lose sight of the truth. It's so much fun to take umbrage, to hold grudges, to trot out the same litany of woe. To believe! Rather than examine the evidence. One must take a deep breath, and stop trying to win the Oscar all the time.
Tonight Scott and Maria's Rufus was talking about something—I forget what. He made some statement, and then said "but I could be wrong."
It took me 50 years to get to that point.
And I backslide constantly.

― Beth Parker, Sunday, 4 March 2007 05:38 (nineteen years ago)

Ah, the wisdom of children :)

― Trayce, Sunday, 4 March 2007 05:40 (nineteen years ago)

oh thanks Beth for that. no offense to any/all, but this thread on wisdm was kind of bumming me out.

I am getting my wisdom (teeth) removed soon. Yay!

― Abbott, Sunday, 4 March 2007 06:16 (nineteen years ago)

But I could be wrong.

― Abbott, Sunday, 4 March 2007 06:17 (nineteen years ago)

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/128/409648838_123a04ea62.jpg?v=0

― Michael White, Sunday, 4 March 2007 08:02 (nineteen years ago)

Whilst it's good to "have a go", don't trust people who say "you don't know 'til you've tried", coz sometimes you do know already.

It's better to think you are capable of anything.

― jel --, Sunday, 4 March 2007 11:08 (nineteen years ago)

What an excellent thread.

Whilst I wouldn't make so bold as to assume any degree of wisdom on my part, I'm currently staring down both barrels of some fairly major life changes. It feels, well, exhilerating, actually. I've discovered qualities I never knew I possessed over the last couple of years. To conflate points made already by Trayce and Aimless I've spent my twenties trying to combine courage and the idea that "this too will pass" into a personal strategy of just getting your head down and getting on with it. As soon as it dawned on me that the furure wasn't being handed to me on a plate I started grafting (I'm well aware this could all sound a little "dragged meself up by me bootsraps", which isn't the case), it's all looked like it might go horribly tits up on more than one occasion but it never has, and so long as I keep plugging away I remain confident that it never will.

― Matt, Sunday, 4 March 2007 11:19 (nineteen years ago)

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