Isn’t it interesting that as we grow older, while our body decays and slows down, our mind increases in wisdom? And our thought processes do not slow that much either.
While conditions like dementia can affect the mind adversely in advanced years, in normal aging we can still learn new skills, a language, a musical instrument, parenting and grand-parenting, arts and crafts etc.
The Pillars have become aware of this over the past 30 years or so. Lifelong learning is now well established in all educational establishments and there are far more students of older years (and mostly highly valued too) in mainstream education than when I was young.
The graphs below are what I imagine the physical and wisdom aging graphs to be like. The age is along the horizontal line – from 0 to 90 (best of luck after that)! The first graph (Graph One) that rises quickly in youth is the physical; and second graph (Graph Two) the line that rises slowly through life and doesn’t diminish in older years is the wisdom one.
Graph One – Physical:
Graph Two – Wisdom:
I wonder does this make sense to you – it certainly does to me. Of course the above graphs are not scientific, or statistically derived – rather they are representations, or a what-I-observe graph – because the parameters of physicality (muscular strength, athleticism, body-mass index and similar); and wisdom (intuition, self-awareness, emotional intelligence and suchlike) are so far apart I’m not sure if it would be possible to compare them statistically. (I don’t know whether or not it has ever been done).
You will observe that our peak physical performance is in our early 20’s up to our early 40’s and then there is a slow but definite decline. Wisdom might not be that high when we are at peak physical age – but as we move into our late 30’s and 40’s (and 50’s) we seem to gradually increase in this area – and can continue to get wiser.
Lucky us!
Because the sponge-like absorption of youth is gone we probably do not learn as rapidly, but the compensation is that what we learn is grafted onto what we have learned before. And wisdom arises from the increasing ability to learn from our experiences and put them in context.
Most of you will have heard of expressions like an old head on young shoulders (to signify a person who is wise but is still young in years) or youth is wasted on the young (to describe how we wish we’d had more cop-on when we had more get-up-and-go) and similar, to describe our fascination with the connection between aging, learning and acquisition of skills and wisdom.
The wisdom gained from difficult life experiences offers unparalleled opportunities for good work.
Because of that it is important that training and education offered to people who aim to work in the area of family support and crisis intervention 1): is congruent with the work that is going to be done, 2): is designed with the people that it is aimed to assist in mind, 3): takes account of knowledge/insight accrued over many years and decades, and 4): resists the temptation to iron out individuality, i.e. the wrinkles of wisdom forged in the (sometimes) difficult experiences of life.
I am going on a bit about this because it has implications for training and education in all areas of life but particularly in the world of helping people in our Focus Group.
This is what this Chapter is about.