Piping in the wisdom

Life leads us into some fascinating conversations.

This afternoon, a client and I ended up in an interesting discussion about life experience and wisdom.

He said to me that he often imagines taking the wisdom from a whole person’s life, and seeking to download it all in about 2 minutes into the brain of some hapless young person.

I agreed with him that there is so much wisdom to be gained from spending time with older people. Most of our wisest friends are on the older end of the spectrum.

But as good as it might be to download the megabytes of wisdom from an old brain into a young one, perhaps what is more necessary is the need to read our situation well. There is no point having a brain full of ‘wisdom’ if there is no capacity to learn to read our own story with an eye to the patterns and the pitfalls.

There is much blessing to come from ‘hanging out’ with those who have a few more greys than ourselves – even better when they patiently spend time with us, helping us to make sense of what we see and experience.

A brainful of wisdom sounds good, but the ability to read life wisely holds more appeal to me – complete with many blunders and ‘learning experiences’. I don’t know that you get wisdom outside of making some of those painful mistakes yourself!