When I was half my age, I couldn’t understand why everyone didn’t think as I did. I had everything figured out—well, nearly everything...everything that mattered, at any rate. I figured that what I hadn’t figured out was either beyond figuring or was not worth figuring. Now that I’m twice my age, I cannot imagine how I could have been so incredibly naïve. Or stupid. Or arrogant. I figure it was the ignorance of my youth.
I found a veritable cache of photographs not long ago, an entire two-drawer cabinet filled to the brim with packages of pictures from before. Before what? Well, before I had some sense, I guess...before I had lightened up...before I had calmed down...just, you know, ‘before’. At first, I was thrilled to have discovered this long-forgotten treasure, but the further I went into the packages, the less comfortable I felt. Although I recognized the places, the faces, the events, it was as though I was somehow eaves-looking (it’s a word...really Ü) into someone else’s life. There were pictures of children who looked very much like my own children did when they were younger, and pictures of a woman who looked very like I might have when I was half (or even three-fifths) my age. It wasn’t so much the fashions of the day I had trouble understanding (though I cannot believe I spiral permed my bum-length hair and wore a braided terrycloth headband – ack!), it was more that I had trouble with the expression on the face of the woman who resembles me. She looks, more than anything, terribly unhappy, and old behind her eyes.
When I was just out of school, I had Big Plans (don’t we all?). I was going to Go Places and I was going to Do Things. I had been accepted at the college of my choice and I had made ten thousand arrangements for ten thousand different things. Then I changed my mind, cancelled it all and did something entirely different. I took a different path and I became a Mum.
It isn’t that I regret my decision—quite the contrary. I’m certain that where I am is where I’m meant to be. I’m equally certain that the people I have been were important too, that I had to be who I was to become who I am. I like that. I wrote it out and pinned it to my board, in fact: “We had to be who we were in order to become who we are.” There’s some wisdom in that, I think. It may only be my own wisdom, but it is wisdom, nonetheless. Perhaps it is useless to anyone else and contains wisdom only for me. Perhaps, at the end of it all, it is only our own wisdom which counts. Perhaps it is What We Learn which matters.
I have learned something from everyone I’ve met, everyone I’ve loved, everyone I haven’t. I have learned to listen and I have learned to speak up. I have even learned to speak out and how to recognize when speaking out is necessary. I have learned to walk a little slower and think a little longer. I have learned to hear what is really being said, what is not being said, and what needs to be said. I have learned to be more kind. I have learned to be more accepting and more trusting. I have learned to be more real. I have learned that when the pain of holding on is greater than the pain of letting go, it is time to let go.
In a few small ways, I have gained wisdom. Not as much as I ought to have done, perhaps, and certainly not as much as I would have liked. Still, I know more now than I did when I lived the life of the woman with age and sadness behind her eyes.
There’s a difference, you see, between knowledge and wisdom. One can know many, many things and still not be wise. Knowledge is little more than Memorisation of Stuff. Wisdom, on the other hand, is Something Else Entirely. I have had the very great blessing of knowing people who have had deep and abiding wisdom. Some of them have had very little in the way of book-learning but they were wise. Such people don’t simply know things in their heads, they understand things in their hearts. Knowing is easy. Understanding isn’t.
I’ve birthed enough children to know that babies come here knowing ‘way more than we give them credit for. They arrive bearing a wisdom we ought to pay attention to. It is unfortunate that babies arrive unable to speak our language and even more unfortunate that, rather than learning to communicate with them, we immediately set about teaching them to communicate with us. Sadly, we also set about teaching them everything we know, forgetting that they know things, too. As we teach our children, and as they learn from us they also un-learn their own wisdom.
It’s quite tragic, really.
I didn’t know any of this, of course, when I was half my age. I refused to learn from Those With Wisdom when they spoke to me, all the while teaching—and un-teaching—my children. If I had it to do over, my initial declaration is that I would do it differently. Upon giving it thought, though, I am not certain I would change anything. An understanding has arisen from what little wisdom I have gained in the years since I was half my age. Perhaps this is as it ought to be. Perhaps it is The Point. Perhaps we are meant to know less the more we learn. Perhaps we are meant to understand more the less we know for sure.
I’m much cleverer now. I now understand that it would be wretched for everyone to think the same way I do. I now understand that the tenuous balance of opposing forces which keeps the Earth orbiting the sun is the same as that which keeps my life in what passes for order. Now that I’m twice my age, I know less and understand more. Now that I’m twice my age I understand much of what caused the sadness behind the eyes of the woman I was, and I give thanks for the opportunity to have been her.
Once, during one of those marvellous, accidental Conversations of Importance, the ones which just sort of blossom from nothing, my children asked if I wasn’t a bit sad about giving up my plans of Going Places and Doing Things in favour of having “lots and lots of children.” They waited only a moment before I gave them the answer I saw written in the five pair of eyes watching me. “Not at all,” I told them, giving silent thanks for the ignorance of my youth. “If I had gone off to do those things, just think what I’d have missed.” They didn’t even notice Wisdom as it slipped into my heart.
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