Zoe says --“coberst, you are most welcome here. You are not the oldest here, but it’s always good to see someone older that I at sixty-three.”
Thank you for that message. Seldom do I find an Internet forum that has a member older than I.
Well, the question is how does one “quest for wisdom”? Unlike football, there is generally not a structured forum where one goes to test and prove their wisdom.
It is my belief that one can only experience life as much as they can. Like football training, you prepare for life by studying as much as you can to prepare yourself. But also like football (or any sport for that matter) at some point the training stops and you need to go out into the real world and put your training to the test.
Older people tend to be wiser because no matter how much you read, it’s not the same thing as experiencing a 25 year career, raising a family, living in various places and so on.
**Believe those who seek the truth; doubt those that find it. ** ~~Andre Gide
mssmith says–“Older people tend to be wiser because no matter how much you read, it’s not the same thing as experiencing a 25 year career, raising a family, living in various places and so on.”
You are correct, reading is not the same thing as experiencing a 25 year career. That is why reading is so very important. I think reality is like an onion and we spend most of our life on its surface. Reading is perhaps the most likely avenue for discovering the rest of reality.
Fear Itself
The quote is a puzzlement!
Those who are certain they know the truth stop looking further. Wisdom is attained along the journey, not by reaching the destination.
I think of reading is like training for a sport. When you train, you run various plays or scenarios you might mind in an actual game. When you experience them in the game, you already have a couple of responses handy. When you read, it’s like already having a bunch of plays to choose from in life.
I think of reading as visiting strange new lands with different and exotic traditions wherein I can explore and learn new and marvelous things that will help me understand my own home and also will help me make my own life at home better.
coberst, a very interesting thread development. I originally read your OP as rather cold, and from the responses, I suppose others did as well. In re-reading it after your subsequent posts, I understand more what you are saying.
I’m 44, and female, so now just beginning to truly get the Wisdom difference between youth and elder. I’ve always had an affinity for older people, and gained perspective from their experience. Yet, in youth, I made plenty of mistakes even with the listening to that advice. One has to go through the complexities of emotion, and analysis of experiences (usually it’s the painful ones that compel more mental work), to have it sink in and be able to make more rational choices. You see that you can survive the rollercoaster of emotion; what once seemed insurmountable is understood at a deeper level, and just another hurdle that your jumping muscles have developed enough to get beyond. Is that what you mean by “understanding”?
I do wonder, too, what the value of diminishing hormones and sexual drive is. I’m hitting perimenopause, and that has some definite ups and downs. I don’t have children, and occassionly regret that, but I also feel a freedom in not having to think about that as a possibility. I find my thoughts turning to how I can best use my time here left to do worthwhile work, to contribute to society. Of course, being an avid reader has made a difference in that worldview.
One important factor; as I get older, I am not swayed by hypnotic advertisements, and can see through them well. As a twenty year old, I was in a place that had a great rebellious alternaculture, so saw through it than, too, but still succumbed to consuming the alternaculture. Now, not so much. Our culture relies on Selling stuff, and an immature mind is the best avenue for that. Fill it on up, because young minds are necessarily wanting the new. Please don’t read that as necessarily negative, that young energy is so much needed by any society, but I think our culture exploits it to some detriment.
And then, the elders who don’t just jangle their nerves on the A Pod get overlooked. In theory. I don’t see the Baby Boomers as accepting that. I’m at the tail-end, but, in my area, see people being very involved and vibrant into their 70’s and 80’s. They offer consulting service, and volunteer in droves for so many endeavors. I think that generation will change the old Out-to-Pasture stereotype for humans. And, with better understanding of how people can achieve the fruits of living long, the means to keep elders well-serviced and thriving will develop.
Of course, I’m not in my 70’s, and am being positive, but leave it to you to detail the issues not being addressed for elders currently.
There’s one thing I have to object to: the emphasis of us fogies (I’m 60) passing on our “wisdom” to our kids and grandkids. I have no kids, grandkids, nieces or nephews, and will never have any. But I’m an artist (which I became *after *the age of 40), and that is what I’ll leave to the world after I’m gone. There’s little “wisdom” in my art, only interesting paintings and photographs that people hang on their walls and enjoy owning.
Both of my parents were also artists, and both are gone now. Literally hundreds of people showed up at their funerals, and so many people I didn’t even know came up to me and said they had some of my parents’ art work in their homes, and will pass these down to their children.
In the last act of Sondheim’s *Sunday in the Park with George, *we learn that “children and art” are the ways in which most of us leave things for the time when we’re gone (they’re not the only ways). My parents were lucky in the sense that they left both children and art to the future. And I, in turn, will leave my art.
Elelle
Thank you for your very thought filled response.
Your statement “In re-reading it after your subsequent posts, I understand more what you are saying.” knocked me out of my chair. I have seldom seen evidence of anyone reading anything more than once. In fact all evidence leads me to conclude that most responders ‘read’ new thread posts much like we read billboards along the highway—a fleeting focus upon a word or phrase for an instant followed by a few moments thought and then back to the ‘drivers reverie’. I suspect we all learned this method of ‘reading’ from our schooling experience.
Your next paragraph that began “I’m 44” may explain part of the anomaly.
I have been trying to understand the meaning of ‘understanding’ for years and I have finally had the eureka moment that leads me to say the understanding is a tipping point, a point when water becomes ice, a dramatic moment when emotion and intellect combine to provide what Carl Sagan said “Understanding is a kind of ecstasy”.
I think that comprehension is a hierarchy, resembling a pyramid, with awareness at the base followed by consciousness (awareness plus attention), succeeded by knowing, with understanding at the pinnacle.
Awareness–faces in a crowd.
Consciousness—smile, a handshake, and curiosity.
Knowledge—long talks sharing desires and ambitions.
Understanding—a best friend bringing constant April.
I am a retired engineer and my experience in the natural sciences leads me to conclude that these natural sciences are far more concerned with knowing than with understanding.
Understanding is a long step beyond knowing and most often knowing provides the results that technology demands. Technology, I think, does not want understanding because understanding is inefficient and generally not required. The natural scientists, with their paradigms, are puzzle solvers. Puzzles require ingenuity but seldom understanding.
You may be correct about people becoming more involved in their later years today, more than before. However, I think that few older people ever became acquainted with their intellect while they were younger and thus their curiosity has dried up and they never, even though they have plenty of time, have discovered the tremendous power and delight that intellect can provide if it is cultivated before curiosity atrophies.
Panche45
Does Winston Churchill qualify as a man of wisdom? Definitely!
Wisdom means to “see life whole”.
I think that there are at least three forms of intellection: textual intellection is what we do when we reason in text form, artistic intellection is reasoning in artistic form, and practical intellection is what we do in our day-to-day living.
I think that one must acquire a significant degree of understanding in each of these three forms of intellection to qualify for the distinction of “seeing life whole”.
Winston was an accomplished painter, he was a historian with many books to his credit and he was accomplished broadly in practical intellection as he demonstrated in his political career.
Bloch observed "the artist chooses the media and the goal of every artist is to become fluent enough with the media to transcend it. At some point you pass from playing the piano to playing music."
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I think that art is a form of understanding and also a form for transmission of understanding. The artist probably is a more common mode of understanding than is letters.
What hasn’t been explicitly mentioned yet is:
The closer you get to 40, the more important it is that 40 year olds aren’t expendable.
And the older you get, typically, the more influence, money, and power you have. Self fulfilling prophecy.
Yes, you are correct. The big question is, will these powerful and influencial people use this power for their own interests or will they use it for the welfare of the community? If they have not been concerned with the welfare of the community on the way up will they care about it when they have the power? I find the evidence to be very discouraging.
There’ll be a mix of good and bad. Don’t discount the change in perspective having a child (or grandchild) has on people.