WISDOM

The gods gave me challenges in my life to which I had to find the proper responses. One must make the wise and right choices or be doomed to fear, anger, and belief. There is nothing to cling to for safety. It is a maelstrom. But one learns that even the maelstrom in all its undeniable power moves in certain ways. One learns how to respond by going with the flow and rolling with the punches. One learns that to be hardened is to be brittle, unable to move, unable to see and recognize what is happening in the moment. One learns to be supple and quick, soft and caring, and no longer stupid and oafish. One learns compassion that stands up to all in its selflessness, for if I am not here, you cannot stop me. I learned to put others first after the gods gave me others who needed me to put them first for their own survival. To do so, another gift from the gods, was easy for me, for the gods taught me love and, for those I loved it was second nature for me to put them before me, or at least know them as myself, for they had already become an integral part of me. I found and expressed the proper responses to that which the gods imposed and graced me in my life and thus attained a level of self-understanding and of life itself and my role in it that comprised a degree of what might be called wisdom. Wisdom is simply a response to what is happening that does no harm but may actually help to bring relief to the situation. Wisdom only comes in the absence of oneself, when there is not an “I” to be attended to. Wisdom is a selfless occurrence, therefore possible to anyone who is no one, at least in that moment.

Such “wisdom” therefore necessarily leaves one rather deflated, even sad, when it finally comes to mind, for it does not suffer pride of accomplishment or love or caring or anything. Wisdom is not a self-reflective act but rather a non-self-reflective occurrence; there is no self, no sense of self, at all in wisdom.