- It's an expertise that wraps information in the human context of life and relates it to generational and historical flow.
- It is factual and procedural knowledge about the world and human affairs.
- It mingles insight and judgment involving complex and uncertain matters of the human condition; there is an appreciation for and understanding of the uncertainties of life.
- It involves a fine-tuned coordination of cognition, motivation, and emotion, knowledge about the self and other people and society.
- It carries knowledge about strategies to manage the peaks and valleys of life.
- It integrates past, present, and future.
A product of cultural and knowledge-based factors, rather than biologically based mechanics of the mind, wisdom accumulates with time -- but only among those who remain open to new experiences. If we must insist on outwitting the constraints of biology, then wisdom -- and not the scalpel -- is our thing.
It may be that we ignore wisdom because, especially over the lifetime of the boomers, we have come to overvalue, say, rocket science. The technological advancement of modern society has bred in us an infatuation with the data we have accumulated. "We've traded information for wisdom," Rechtschaffen offers.
We have confounded the accumulation of data with its application, or even an understanding of it. Wisdom, on the other hand, always puts information back in the context of human life.
Sherwin Nuland is a man forced by the exigencies of his profession to look time squarely in the eye. Old age, he says, is a "time to become contemplative, to recognize our value to people younger than ourselves." Now in his sixties, Nuland stopped operating when "I realized I was no longer as nimble as a 45-year-old. But I expect to continue contributing my knowledge and experience as long as possible." Unfortunately, he says, "the younger generation doesn't always accept it, from me or others. They see their elders as crotchety and selfish, their maturity and wisdom of no use--outdated. Age warfare continues."
Perhaps we don't recognize the wisdom of aging because our anxiety about the future-of the world, of ourselves--has overwhelmed our respect for history. We live, Rechtschaffen says, with only a linear sense of time. We push inexorably toward the future; the past is nothing. In other eras, we lived by a more circular sense of time, which allowed for a father's, even a grandfather's, experience to guide us. There was an intuitive apprehension -- wisdom, if you will -- that the way to deal with the future rests in an understanding of the past. Even today, many indigenous tribal societies and Eastern cultures live by a circular sense of time.
The baby boomers have made it successfully, albeit noisily, through the first two-thirds of their lives, having rejected -- indeed defying -- the teachings of their elders. But the prospect of making it through the next third satisfied with their accomplishments and their selves requires they find inner meaning in their lives.
To give their lives purpose, they might turn from what Nuland calls "the hurly-burly of getting and spending" to a more contemplative life. And they might pay more attention to those who have already crossed the border into old age, to value their experience; to embrace their elders is to embrace their future selves. Perhaps, most of all, they might begin to think of their own death. After all, to be fully alive includes being fully aware of dying.
So long as we lock ourselves into an obsession with the youth culture, we can only develop age rage and dehumanize ourselves, says Betty Friedan. Those who give up their denial of age, who age consciously, "grow and become aware of new capacities they develop while aging.... [They] become more authentically themselves."
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cultural elite,
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disenfranchisement,
ethicists,
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lack of respect,
median age,
obsolescence,
psychological torture,
retirement age,
social security legislation,
sociologists,
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