Part 1
“ Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.” William Shakespeare
Perhaps you could say that about wisdom, too. Occasionally you run across someone who does indeed appear to have been born wise. They are not old enough to have had sufficient experience to have learned wisdom; it seems innate. Others do have wisdom thrust upon them; frequently, sadly, as the result of some terrible experience from which they manage to emerge with newfound wisdom. Most of us simply stagger through life hoping that we gather a modicum of wisdom as we go.
Wisdom is unpredictable. It comes to us all in varying amounts and at different life stages. You cannot learn to be wise. I don’t believe you can get it from books or from other, wiser, people. You can’t obtain it by quoting the wisdom of others. That might perhaps make you sound wise, but it isn’t your wisdom.
However, if I were to pick one person to quote in the hope of the words being taken for my wisdom, it would be Shakespeare. There, in my opinion, was a truly wise man. One of the reasons his plays go on and on over the centuries is that the wisdom he expressed so succinctly over four hundred years ago still resonates with us today.
The quote I began this page with, for example: so simply stated but so true. Or -
“There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.”
How can we argue with that?
“Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none.”
The world would be a better place, would it not?
“This above all; to thine own self be true.”
No-one in this room’s going to argue with that, or with -
“Who could refrain that had a heart to love and in that heart courage to make love known.”
Oh I could go on for pages; for hours. But I’ll have mercy and stop. And I’ll close with my favorite quote of all time, actually not from good old Will but penned by someone called Reinhold Niebuhr. To me it is one of the simplest expressions of so many of life’s conundrums.
“God give me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.”
And if we can do that, we are surely, truly, wise.
Part 2
The day I completed that first page, May 28th 2014, Maya Angelou died. On TV, of course, there were endless film clips of her talking or reading her wonderful poems. So how could I not include her many wonderful thoughts, given the topic of wisdom?
"History, despite its wrenching pain,” she says, “cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again."
And she has her own, somewhat less gentle, version of the Serenity Prayer:
“If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude.”
“ … People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
Oh so true, both the good and the bad.
And I find her wisdom encompasses us, gays and lesbians, often.
“Love recognizes no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at it’s destination full of hope.” And -
“ … the wisest thing I can do is be on my own side, be an advocate for myself and others like me.”
She speaks to women, of course -
“A wise woman wishes to be no-one’s enemy; A wise woman refuses to be anyone’s victim.”
She values laughter, particularly at ourselves -
“My life has been one great big joke, a dance that’s walked, a song that’s spoke,
I laugh so hard I almost choke when I think about myself.”
And our storytelling group -
“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
(I don’t see how any of us could have many left untold!)
And best of all, she knows exactly what wisdom is. Actually she uses the word “intelligence,” but if you paraphrase and replace “intelligence,” with “wisdom,” I think it is just perfect. So, with apologies, Maya -
“I’m grateful to wise people. That doesn’t mean educated. That doesn’t mean intellectual. I mean really wise. What black old people used to call ‘mother wit’ means wisdom that you had in your mother’s womb. That’s what you rely on. You know what’s right to do.”
I don’t know how better to describe wisdom than that.
© June 2014
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