Principles
Wisdom
Wisdom
At first life seems to be a cause and effect relationship. You're hungry, you eat. You jump, you fall. You push something, it moves. There is action, then reaction. In nature the rules are severe. If you get caught, you get eaten. Miss the prey and you weaken. People follow these rules. Work, get paid. Play ball, try to win. Compete at a career, go to the top. The action and the person are one, and the effort and person are one. As long as this relationship maintains itself, there is no need for deviation. The stronger or smarter or just more fortunate you are, the longer this can persist.
The problem arises when something goes wrong with cause and effect. Small discrepancies start to creep in, disrupting the 1 to 1 relationship of this paradigm. Larger errors enter and the relationship begins to be questioned. Illness, corruption, the environment and chance whither it away. The 2nd law of thermodynamics causes erosion. At 50, one is left at some point questioning what went wrong. This question leads to introspection, awareness, looking into how everything works, or doesn't, the why, even the reason. As time goes on, sometimes things work and sometimes they don't. One has to live with failure, partial or full. And sometimes there is just plain defeat with no answers. The cause and effect relationship, the action reaction relationship, makes no sense and one is bewildered. One wonders, theorizes, proposes reasons why, with some truer than others. And sometimes one is forced to just be patient and wait. All this is leading to wisdom, an awareness of what is; observations of what occurs and their interrelationships. All this is shared with others at different stages. Again, this is wisdom.
Wisdom will not replace the force and control one had when the cause and effect relationship was intact. That was when a person was more powerful although less aware. Wisdom is a defense, an effort to explain why something doesn't work. At first everything was in control. Wisdom wasn’t needed. Then everything wasn't. The latter is closer to the reality of existence and wisdom acknowledges this.