Acquiring Knowledge in Youth

We spend our first twenty years or so of life acquiring knowledge. We learn our ABC’s and our math facts. We discover all those squiggly little lines will turn into reading and stories and adventures that you can absorb and sometimes—when we are lucky—we can disappear into them. I still wonder if the characters stop mid-action when we put the book down and wait patiently for us to return?

The Rigidity & Certainty of All the Rules

Math always follows it’s own rules, if you can learn them (unlike spelling whose rules all have an exception. The rules always work and have to be memorized. They can’t be faked. My strongest memory of third grade is of struggling to learn the multiplication tables. My dad would randomly catch me at home and ask for a set of times tables. I still remember him saying, “Think, my girl”, and then I’d have to add up all my 9’s again in my head—ugh!—until I finally had them in my memory.

Learning Social Survival

More importantly, school teaches us to survive in society. Share. Take turns. You don’t always get the first turn. you have to wait in line, and sometimes stand next to the kid who makes faces at you or picks his nose. Work hard so you can go to recess AND how to survive on the playground. Bullies and dodgeball are best avoided unless you want to get hit in the face!

Life’s Continuity Amid Forks in the Road

”And life went on.

It was not the same, 

but it went on.”

Embracing Life’s Unpredictability

The most important advice I gave my students over the years was “my life did not go as planned…AND…that’s okay”. This is wisdom. Learning what John Steinbeck meant when he wrote, “the best laid plans of mice and men go aft astray and leave us naught but pain and sorry for promised joy”.

Adapting to Life’s Changes

Plans and preparations are important to success. But life has a funny sense of humor and often turns plans into wishes. Wisdom is learning how to carve and shape our dreams and wishes to fit the reality of life. Often, Steinbeck is wrong. The best laid plan that go astray often lead us to new doors we wouldn’t have otherwise found and joy in unexpected places.

The Joy or Seeing Life through the Eyes of Wisdom

Wisdom is being Nana now rather than full-time mom. It’s being able to say to grandkids, “you bet!! We can have chocolate milk on our fruit loops”, and “of course I have time to read a story, make cookies or listen to what you have to say”. You are able to give these little people the grace you wish you’d known about as a younger human, balancing work and home and family—hoping you got it right enough of the time.

Feeling Outdated

Wisdom is also feeling like a dinosaur at times. It’s becoming your parents when you tell young people the “old ways” of writing checks, and long distance phone call charges. It’s about the strange glazed look in their eyes when you recall not having a cell phone or a bike helmet. My first classroom thirty years ago didn’t have a computer or a smart board. It didn’t even have a white board. The faculty shared a monstrosity of a computer in the faculty room. And knowing how to run a mimeograph machine and fudge different bits of information together with enough tape that it looked like a proper worksheet when it came out of the cop machine. 

The Loneliness of Aging

But, like all changes, wisdom and growing older is lonely. It’s feeling like a set of encyclopedias—full of valuable information that nobody ever opens.

The Treasured Value of Perspective

In the end, wisdoms and knowledge, used wisely, helps us be able to see more than one point of view or to put ourselves in the other guy’s shoes. If we are unable to grow and change, my grandpa would have put it like this: “here lies the body of ‘William Jay, who died defending his right of way. He was right, dead right, as he sped along. But he’s just as dead as if he’d been wrong”.