The Wisdom of Life
Experience
“Old age never comes
alone.”
—Folk Wisdom
When I was young, I wanted silver/grey hair. I thought it looked
great on a man. For me, it was a visible sign of maturity and wisdom; but now
that I have sliver/grey hair, I cannot help but laugh at what it cost me for my
maturity and wisdom, and I have to ask myself: was it worth the cost?
Presupposing, of course, that along with my silver/grey hair I have the
maturity and wisdom that I longed for in my callow youth.
I had a house painting business for years, which I expanded
to include drywall hanging and taping (for a few years I also did wallpaper
hanging and carpet cleaning for extra income), and I used to love working for
seniors just to soak up their wisdom; inevitably then, I loved to talk and get
them to open up to me. Most did, and those that didn’t only challenged me to
try harder; but even those that didn’t open up to me had a lot of wisdom to
offer in their guarded silence. They taught me that some things were better
kept unsaid.
Osmosis is a great teacher, and I picked up a lot of wisdom
from my guarded customers all the same; but I learned most from customers that enjoyed
talking with me. I can still remember like it was yesterday the mother of a
high school friend of mine whose house I painted and carpets I cleaned a number
of times over the years who loved to quote little gems of life wisdom; but of
all the precious little gems that she quoted, the one that comes to mind bears direct
relevance to today’s spiritual musing:
“Old age never comes alone.”
The first time she shared this gem with me, I was much too
young to appreciate all the aches and pains and sorrows and heartache that gave
birth to it; now I do. But I cannot help but wonder, why does life wisdom cost
so dear? Cannot we learn it another way?
Of course, we can. That’s why I love to read. Reading is a
shortcut to life wisdom, and the great poetry and literature of the world is
jam-packed with so much life wisdom that one cannot process it all in one
reading; that’s why I often read books over again, especially anthologies of
poetry, short stories, and essays.
One book that instantly comes to mind is my duck-taped copy
of Memoirs, Dreams, Reflections by
C.G. Jung, who was the true founder of modern depth psychology with his
discovery of the collective unconscious; not a book for many readers, I know,
but for me it continues to be a fount of wisdom because it tells the remarkable
story of man who made the human condition the center of all his studies, and I marvel
at the human condition
The human condition is never the same for every person, but
it always has the same effect of making one wiser in the ways of the world. “There is nothing either good or bad but
thinking makes it so,” said Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a poetic justification
for moral relativism that annoys me to no end because in my quest for life
wisdom I came to see that life is not “a tale told by an idiot full of sound
and fury signifying nothing,” as Shakespeare’s disillusioned Macbeth bemoaned
to the world, but full of meaning and purpose; which was why I loved listening
to my senior customers talking about their life’s journey.
This might be why I grew to appreciate the concept of
synchronicity, a term that C. G. Jung created to describe a coincidence that has
special meaning for a person, because from the perspective of one’s senior
years one can view their life from a distance and connect dots that one could
not possibly have imagined when one was in the throes of their own life
condition. This is why Robert H. Hopcke wrote in There Are No Accidents: Synchronicity and the Stories of Our Lives:
“…our lives have a narrative structure,
like that of novels, and at those moments we call synchronistic this structure
is brought to our awareness in a way that has a significant impact upon our
lives.”
Which implies an inherent guiding principle to life that we
are not aware of until we have had enough personal experience to connect the
dots of our life, like the synchronicity experience that I had in my early
twenties that got me into the pool hall business. Sure, it was pure “chance” that
I just happened to be standing outside the pool hall that day waiting for it to
open up, little expecting that that day would change the course of my life. The
recently widowed elderly owner was inside sweeping and cleaning the pool hall
and in tears because the indigenous young man she had hired had left the place
in a mess and for some “inexplicable” reason I volunteered to clean it up for
her, which “inspired” me to ask if she would lease the pool hall business out
to me, and she did, and I operated the pool hall (to which I added pinball
machines and a juke box, not to mention selling hot dogs which drew more customers
in) for several years before I went to Annecy, France to live for a year where
I had a mystical experience that impelled me to return to Canada and go to
university and study philosophy where the serendipitous gift of the book In Search
of the Miraculous by P. D. Ouspensky introduced me to a teaching that
changed my life forever.
From my vantage point today, I have connected dots that I
could not possibly have imagined when I was in the throes of my own life
condition; that’s why I marvel at the cynical nihilism of those who believe
that life is a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing;
it’s not. Life has inherent meaning and purpose, but one has to step back and
reflect upon one’s life to see it. This is why I love writing my spiritual
musings; they give me the perspective I need to connect dots, and the dots that
I connected today were inspired by something that one of my old customers said
to me, a little gnostic gem that reflects the simple truth that with age comes
maturity and wisdom, however we come by it.
——
