What is Wisdom?

As we grow older we are able to increasingly connect, in a cognitive and affective sense, apparently disparate things. This is what “good” experience is all about. For a teacher the connection we are talking of would mean, for instance, using the experience gained in getting a low performer to be a high achiever in situation A to be used for another student in a different situation, call it B, to succeed. The educator unconsciously sees a pattern where the two students and their situations, even if completely different to an external observer, are seen as instances of a bigger something. The teacher is able to transcend the apparent differences between the two cases and get to something higher: some cogno-affective whole. This is really abstraction; not in a narrow scholastic sense, but in a living active sense. This kind of abstraction is wisdom.

All of us grew up with some great stories. Here, what comes to mind is the “Prince and the Spider” story where the prince, vanquished and imprisoned, learns the lesson of determination from a spider that keeps rebuilding its broken web an untold number of times to finally get it right to climb out of the cellar. The wise king is able to make a connection between the spider and himself. This is a process of abstraction – the two lives (of oneself and the spider) meeting at a higher plane where determination is that unifying “something”. The two disparate lives are connected at a higher level of “will”, never mind whether those are of the brave prince and a mere spider. After all both are creations of God!

The proof of the pudding lies in eating it. The precocious prince after all escaped the prison and won the war with the lesson learnt from the spider.

All of us grew up with some stories which in our childhood made sense to us in their concreteness. The concrete reality with its theatrical qualities impressed us. As we get older the stories acquire a different meaning. Their concreteness or “reality value” is immaterial. One is almost indifferent to the whether the story was real or not. The story is real even if it has not happened. It’s real for its potential. This kind of thinking is useful and older people have greater capacity for such thinking. According to Elkhonon Goldberg (author of “The Wisdom Paradox: How Your Mind can Grow Stronger as Your Brain Gets Older”) this capacity is on account of more neural firing in a brain that simply worked longer.