Wisdom

Concepts for Thriving
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Wisdom

Wisdom grows and deepens through experience, knowledge, choices, and inspired actions that support thriving for all.

  • Experience flows from exploring life with curiosity, which helps us wisely discern what supports thriving from what does not.
  • The knowledge of potent concepts (both ancient and fresh) helps us make wise and practical choices while adapting to life’s challenges with real skill and confidence.
  • Inspired action that arises from our growing wisdom expands our heartistry to influence our own well-being and support thriving for all.

Wisdom for Surviving… Wisdom for Thriving

Humans have a vast base of knowledge — often gathered through pain and loss — about how to survive. We also have wisdom about thriving. It’s useful to discern one from the other.

When we’re in the forest, there are threats. Watch where you step! A forest has obstacles that can hurt our bodies. Beware what you eat! A forest can have berries and mushrooms that are beautiful… and deadly. Be aware all around you! A forest can have predators that can kill us… and even cute little skunks can smell up our day.

Those who have lived in a territory have wisdom about how to survive there. It’s unwise to be ignorant of such wisdom, and it’s dangerous to ignore it. That’s wisdom for surviving.

In every human activity — sport, relationship, profession, hobby — there is wisdom for surviving. It’s useful to learn such wisdom, even if we choose to consciously take risks others would not.

In the forest, there are sounds, smells, and sights! Look closely and discover wonders aplenty. Soften your eyes and take in nature in its glory. Feel how each new section of the trail changes how you move and relate to your surroundings.

What textures attract you? How does it feel when the sun breaks through the trees and shines on your heart? Notice how past death and fresh sprouts exist in the same sliver of the whole. Breathe it in. Exhale whatever you no longer need.

That is wisdom for thriving. Same forest.

Wisdom for surviving helps us confidently explore our thriving.

But what if we’re short of useful wisdom on surviving in a particular place or situation? In such cases, wise guides are useful. They can help those with less depth of knowledge and experience navigate with safety… and hold space for curious exploration.

Wisdom Wrapped in Humility

Wisdom is meant to be shared.

Shared survival wisdom means those we care about are less likely to be seriously or fatally injured or develop chronic disease. Parents pass on survival wisdom they have learned to their children, sometimes freshening it for the times we live in now.

Wisdom for thriving helps us grow and expand and live a lifestyle that suits us ever more deeply and completely.

But…

The survival wisdom for a desert is different from that of a rainforest. So, too, wisdom for thriving in one culture or for one person’s nature may be utterly different from the wisdom that would support your thriving.

Wrapping the wisdom we share in humility means we acknowledge upfront that the wisdom we’re offering feels good and right for us, for who we are and what matters to us personally and amongst those who share kinship with us.

Imagine telling someone who is skilled and delights in rock climbing that to survive it’s “wise to avoid high places where you might fall.” Ok, true if you value “not falling at all cost” over the challenge and adventure of rock climbing!

To thrive in certain cultures, too, brings variations in applicable wisdom.

Emotional Freedom, for example, supports more thriving. Suppressed and punished feelings cause trauma. And generational trauma stops many, many people from expressing their heartistry.

However… there are cultures where “obligation” is what is respected, and to be free feeling and free thinking can bring threats to survival and even being outcast or worse. Here’s where we humbly know that this wisdom — these useful concepts for thriving — can run into apparent conflict with wisdom for surviving in certain groups and countries.

Whether person-to-person or in a sharing like this… we feel it is loving and useful wisdom to wrap even your most profound truth and dearest wisdom in the humility of not knowing if… or when… it will be right for any other.

Useful Questions

  • What wisdom do I know that applies here?
  • Is this wisdom for surviving or thriving?
  • What have I experienced where I have yet to harvest wisdom for my future surviving and thriving?

Resources

Related Concepts

Awareness, Body Guidance, Choices, Clarity, Co-Creating, Concepts, Curiosity, Discernment, Diversity Spectrum, Heartistry, Influence, Lifestyle Design, Practical, Real Skills, Student-Teacher, Useful Questions, Usefulness

Links

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Stephen S. Hall, a science journalist, has written about wisdom in terms of eight qualities or pillars — in his book “Wisdom: From Philosophy to Neuroscience” (Vintage Books, 2011).

Here are the eight qualities of wisdom:

  1. Emotional regulation. We learn how to balance our reason and emotions in decisions.
  2. Knowing what’s important. We learn how to focus ourselves on what is truly important in our lives (usually our families, close friends, work).
  3. Moral reasoning. We learn what’s right and wrong.
  4. Compassion. We learn to treat others and ourselves with kindness.
  5. Humility. We learn how little we really know and gain perspective.
  6. Altruism. We learn how to be involved with more than ourselves.
  7. Patience. We learn to delay immediate gratification for future rewards.
  8. Dealing with uncertainty. We learn to adapt to change and grow.
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Wisdom respects ALL people in ALL their differences…

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It’s easy to envy people with incredible wisdom until you remember the incredible pain they endured to acquire it. The fruits of wisdom taste sweet, but they’re earned by walking through the thorn bush. — David Perell

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Cheryl Richardson

The Way of the Wise Elder

In January of 2012, during a TedXWomen talk, Jane Fonda referred to the last three decades of a person’s life as the third act, a developmental stage she sees as a staircase leading to: “the upward ascension of the human spirit bringing us into wisdom, wholeness, and authenticity.” Jane sees age not as pathology, but as potential. Now that longevity affords us another second adult life, we have time to evolve even more before we die.

I’ve held her perspective close over the last seven years. The challenges and opportunities of aging have become fodder for a new stage of personal growth that has given me some of the toughest challenges I’ve ever faced and some of the best years of my life.

If you’ve followed this blog you know the climb has not been predictable. The unexpected loss of loved ones, the sudden need to care for elderly parents, and the ongoing tangle with an ego hell-bent on returning to the comfort of familiar roles, have made it more like traveling on a spiral staircase with twists and turns that require new skills.

I’ve always been a gal who likes a roadmap – a linear, practical way of achieving goals. I see this as a more traditional, masculine way of navigating life. But the post-midlife journey calls for something different. When I rise above and look down at the last several years since dramatically cutting back my traveling and teaching schedule, I see a more feminine path, a way of navigating the journey toward elderhood with a new kind of artistry.

There are capabilities to be developed if you want to become the kind of elder who is full of life, steeped in gratitude, eager and excited for new adventures, and able to respond to anything placed before you with wisdom and grace. The capabilities include:

The ability to let go of responsibilities that are no longer yours.

The ability to make space and sit with it.

The ability to be with yourself without distractions.

The ability to know when enough is enough.

The ability to stand firm against the ego’s demands.

The ability to return to the present moment.

The ability to set firm, loving boundaries.

The ability to be vulnerable, authentic, and intimate.

The ability to speak the truth with grace and kindness.

The ability to take risks that foster aliveness.

The ability to befriend death.

These are the skills I’ve been working on over the last seven years, sometimes with great joy, sometimes kicking and screaming every step of the way. Here’s what I know: Cultivating these capabilities will not only help us to make the most out of our remaining years, they’ll mold us into the kind of wise elders so many of us wish we had when we were growing up (and maybe even now).

I plan to write more about these abilities. As you look over the list, I’d love to know the one you’re currently working on, the one you feel more proficient in already, and the one with your name written all over it because it’s your next new frontier?

Love,
Cheryl

(Thanks @Angelsloveyou for posting this on Facebook)

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That was an awesome message wasn’t it. I think it might make a good workshop subject, what do you think?

How do we know what responsibilities aren’t ours? I know some of them but when I got married I didn’t agree verbally or in writing that I would cook for 64 years. But I also don’t want to just eat cheese sandwiches, hot dogs, tomato soup and fish sticks either.

I’m not real good at being with myself without distractions. I go to sleep.

Enough is enough! Yeah it sure can be!

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For me Wisdom asks, “Is responsibilities something that feels like something I choose to seek and take on?”

Again for me, that answer is no. I wisely seek what matters to me. Proper nourishment matters to ME, and I am also devoted to supporting my family’s nourishment, too. That evokes in me certain responses, so I am response-able.

Responsible is felt by me as the unwise burdening myself, yoking myself to. Ugh. No thanks.

Response-able-ness feels savvy and useful.

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I like this way of looking at this, I remember we’ve talked about it before. But sometimes it feels like that burden that I’ve yoked myself to and yes it is Ugh. That’s what I’ve been feeling lately and I want to get past it. There are other reasons for why I’m feeling this way. I need a handyman and some other help.

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Human memory is not designed to archive. Human memory is designed to forget—almost everything and distill to wisdom. If a memory continues to reoccur after 24 months, we have not distilled the wisdom that all memories must bring.

Trauma will not erase—but wisdom heals. @BrianRoemmele