I often define wisdom as “metabolized experience mindfully shared for the common good.” That first word—metabolized—is crucial. Experience alone doesn’t automatically yield wisdom. If it did, every elder would be a sage. Instead, life asks us to do the digestion ourselves: to process, to extract the nutrients, and to discard what doesn’t serve. Without that inner alchemy, we risk circling endlessly in the cul de sac, replaying the same arguments, dating the same archetypes, or ignoring the same signals our body has been sending for years.
Think of wisdom as a recipe:
- Ingredients = our raw life experiences
- Capacity = the skill to distill and make meaning
- Conduit = a touch of grace, allowing something larger to flow through us (maybe even love)
Two cooks might step into the kitchen. One is 70 with a pantry full of ingredients but little capacity to use them. The other is 30, with fewer ingredients but the deftness of a master chef. Who would you rather trust to create a nourishing meal?
The metaphor of the cul de sac is so apt because it captures the flavorless repetition of an unexamined life. You’re moving, but you’re not progressing. It’s safe, familiar, suburban in the worst sense—orderly, but without depth. The invitation is to notice: Where in your life are you driving in circles? What conversations keep looping? What patterns keep reappearing like a song on repeat?
The good news is that every cul de sac has an exit. Sometimes it requires slowing down enough to recognize the turn we keep missing. Sometimes it requires asking for directions from a wise companion. And sometimes it simply requires the courage to stop circling and trust that there’s a road forward we’ve yet to take.
So let me ask you: in what part of your life are the lessons still waiting to be metabolized—and what would it take for you to become the master chef of your own experience?
-Chip