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Oscar Wilde wrote, “With age comes wisdom, but sometimes age comes alone.”
Sometimes age comes alone. We all certainly hope; almost even expect that as we grow older, we grow wiser. Age is the absolute certainty; aside from the existence of wormholes theorized in Albert Einstein’s Special Relativity. As for growing wiser, well that might actually take some work.
Throughout more than 25 years in Systems Engineering, I’ve defined and developed requirements for large complex Government Satellites Communication Systems. What distinguishes the requirement from the mere “nice to have” is the use of the word “shall”.
Consider the rather generic System Requirement: The System shall have the communications bit-error rate of 0.001. Bit-error rate measures the number of error bits for a given data transmission stream for various data rates. The requirement specifies an average of 1 error bit in 1000 transmitted bits. The transmission could be a video conference, voice call or digital data stream.
Satisfying the requirement, the System provides the specified performance fidelity for its users, the people sending and receiving messages. So basically everyone’s happy. Systems engineering spends allocated resources and money to verify and to test the requirement. This can be an exhaustive and extended process. It could take possibly a few years to verify the requirement from inception.
Consider the requirement: With age shall come wisdom. Not necessarily. Rather in the Systems Engineering discipline, this requirement verification has a large margin of error. In other words: Nothing is guaranteed. There will be instances where this requirement completely fails.
Consider the human requirement: We all shall age. Yes, that’s verifiable. That we get wiser as we get older is entirely optional. As we get older, wiser is certainly possible. How likely is that? Well, wiser is really up to you and me.
I believe wisdom doesn’t occur in knowing a lot of shit. Knowing a lot of shit means you know a lot of shit. Wisdom occurs when you are open to applying what you know. I discover value in what’s outside and inside of me. I take what’s useful, discarding what’s not. Wisdom is about making the world work for everyone.
When you learn to ride a bike, you don’t read a book to understand balance. You get to balance to ride a bike. You become balance. Really, I believe we get wisdom in our discovery of life.
When I throw the 250-pound man to the mat in Aikido, I use my ki, my one point, what I got from Ozawa Sensei when we trained together at Hombu Dojo, the World Aikido Headquarters. Sensei is part of me. I don’t think about how to throw some big dude. I just throw. I become the throw. I get Sensei’s wisdom in what I do and in who I’m being.
Perhaps, our conventional knowledge paradigm is overrated. Knowing a lot of shit can delude us into thinking that we are indeed wise. Wisdom isn’t believing I’m smarter than you. Wisdom isn’t asserting I know more than you. Wisdom surrenders to knowing I still have a lot to learn.
No one possesses wisdom, per se. You become the open invitation for wisdom to occur and arise in you. Wisdom isn’t about knowing and protecting secrets. Wisdom gives everything away that I’ve been gifted so that others may become greater. Wisdom is not all about you or me.
Wisdom is about others becoming greater than they know themselves to be. Wisdom is about the greater world for all people.
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Photo credit: Pixabay