Wisdom

Many of you know I struggled significantly in my late 40s, feeling more like a "modern failure" than a "modern elder." My life had become predictable and overwhelmingly negative. Everything was crap! To wrestle my ego, control, and status to the ground, fate threw me a curve ball. Really, it was more like a rare knuckleball, and I was striking out left and right.

To ferment is to distill something down to its essence and preserve it. We do it with beer, wine, yogurt, kimchi, and kombucha.

This was shared by a friend. The source states that it was borrowed and they don't know who to credit it to, but thank you, whoever you are! If you have not yet seen this, you may find some important life lessons. It feels like a good Thanksgiving lesson.

“The problem in middle life, when the body has reached its climax of power and begins to decline, is to identify yourself, not with the body, which is falling away, but with the consciousness of which it is a vehicle. This is something I learned from myths. What am I? Am I the bulb that carries the light? Or am I the light of which the bulb is a vehicle? One of the psychological problems in growing old is the fear of death. People resist the door of death. But this body is a vehicle of consciousness, and if you can identify with the consciousness, you can watch this body go like an old car. There goes the fender, there goes the tire, one thing after another— but it’s predictable. And then, gradually, the whole thing drops off, and consciousness rejoins consciousness.” Joseph Campbell, “The Power of Myth”

I’ve written quite a bit about the value of creating a practice of spending 20-30 minutes each weekend sorting through your most significant lessons of the past week—personally and professionally—including how these lessons might enlighten you moving forward. I’ve been writing in my physical and, now, digital “Wisdom Books” for 34 years, and I’ve yet to find a more reliable method of metabolizing one’s experiences into wisdom.

I’m high on life sitting on my deck at an Austrian medical spa on the bucolic Lake Altaussee with Yosemite-like sheer cliff faces facing me.

Wisdom is a tricky topic. You know it when you see it. So, we’ve always had a complex relationship with the proclamation that MEA is the world’s first midlife wisdom school. Anyone who professes they’re wise probably isn’t.

Chip’s August 10th Wisdom Well post "My Wisdom Principles & Practices" caused me to reflect on my own perspective as someone who has spent many, many weeks at MEA Baja. With Chip’s permission, here’s my version (in italics) of “Chip’s Wisdom Principles & Practices 2.0”:

"No one can give away wisdom. A teacher can only lead you to it via words, hoping you will have the courage to look within yourself and find it inside your own consciousness…The wisdom humanity seeks lies within the consciousness of all." - Sydney Banks

“Our universities fail to guide us down the easiest paths to wisdom… Rather than teaching a sense of awe, they teach the very opposite: counting and measuring over delight, sobriety over enchantment, a rigid hold on scattered individual parts over an affinity for the unified and whole. These are not schools of wisdom, after all, but schools of knowledge, though they take for granted that which they cannot teach — the capacity for experience, the capacity for being moved, the Goethean sense of wonderment.” - Poet Hermann Hesse