Between Age and Wisdom

Wisdom doesn’t always come with age.

That, we sure know of.

However, shouldn’t one at least gain some maturity and knowledge over years of experiences? Unless, one was locked in a twilight zone of where there is only recursive and mundane, factory-work like series of events – no one can escape change. With that change, comes growth and learning. Of course, it doesn’t always mean betterment in our personality but at least the knowledge of what should be better comes to us. Our survival instinct assures that. It’s in our genes to absorb and learn from the stimuli around us. Reacting properly though,  is a different thing.

It is like throwing a piece of stone in a pond of water. The water may react violently, or calmly produce ripples. No matter what happens, the stone will forever be part of the pond. There’s no denying that whatever me may go through or however we may behave based on those events, we always gain something. Big or small, it is definitely not non-existent. We are simply wired to learn, no matter how young or old.

With each of us having very little chance of being completely ignorant of any learning from any event in our lives – it just becomes an excuse when we say we’ve grown old but not learned. The lessons we take have always been ours to keep. They or our growth from them maybe incomplete but they have always been ours – ours to remember and look back to, and hopefully develop even more from.

It’s no longer a question of if, but of how much and when.

How much have we gained?

When will we change into a better person based on what we’ve gained?

For every year that we add to our age, we add another year of experiences to our internal bank of wisdom. Even if nothing grand happened for a year, we still come up with certain realizations and understanding that are actually triggered by the lackluster events themselves. If we just try to think about them and wrap our minds around it a bit.

The problem with us is that we give too much emphasis on things that are grandiose and the notable; too little (or none at all) for the simple and quite events in our lives. Again, no matter how big or small something in our lives our, it is still a vital source of learning and growth. The tools of wisdom have always surrounded us, we just need to take it and put it to good use.

There are certain people that would have seemed to grow old without maturing. It is not that they have learned nothing over their years; they are not just acting on them. That maybe their greatest folly: to already have something that could make one’s life better but not use it. That becomes a completely different problem then. It is now closer to hypocrisy than ignorance.

Maybe we should all start teaching each other about acknowledging what we know and have and start acting based on them.

Life is a learning process in itself. There is no escaping our own growth. We just refuse it so we can be bitter, or extricate ourselves from the world, force attention to us and many other excuses.

In between age and wisdom, there is our stubbornness.