Wisdom and Time
Is wisdom love in action?
Mistakes can kill; it was ever thus. We endeavor to avoid the mistakes we’ve made before, and instead to make new mistakes. It used to be that the old carried the wisdom of the past, and told the young how to avoid the landmines in the road of life. Now the young carry the wisdom of the past in their cell phones.
It is no accident that we human females live long past menopause. The Grandmother Hypothesis, is what the anthropologists call it. We women live a long time because back in the day – that same ancient day when elders were the guardians of wisdom – it was the existence of grandmothers that enabled humans to survive. Grandmothers were the caregivers, the teachers, who allowed both the father and the mother of a child to be productive workers despite our lengthy period of childhood dependence. Those long spans of years – women’s old age and human childhood – were tied together from the start, the one caused by the other. But today we struggle to find care for our young because their care has become disconnected from the grandmothers and our supposed wisdom.
The role of older women as wisdom keepers, as nurturers of children, have become unrecognizable. We older women look around and find it hard to visualize the wisdom of age in the world we inhabit. Instead we see leaders who are plenty old enough for wisdom making terrible mistakes, the kinds of mistakes you cannot fix by consulting your cell phone. The kinds of mistakes they would have outgrown if they had truly taken care of their children and grandchildren. We see there is no guarantee that wisdom comes with age. We wonder what meaning to make about these older years when our grown children and our grandchildren have moved to the other side of the continent. What exactly is it that we have to offer, to ourselves and to the world?
Writers and thinkers from Carl Jung to Mary Pipher tell us that older age is the time for reflection. That we do have wisdom, or the capacity to find it and share it. Yet the famous invisibility of older women in our culture has devolved into OK Boomer derision. So what exactly should we do with what we know?
The older women I know struggle with this; perhaps your friends do too. One friend who is a retired school administrator says anyone who teaches in order to share their wisdom is in for a rude shock: That children don’t want to listen to their teachers, but instead want a listening ear. Another woman who spent her career as a therapist says that wisdom is love, or at least includes love, and that if we have paid attention we have learned to love by now.
Maybe we have wisdom, maybe we don’t, but we do have time. When I canvassed for political groups in this election year, I looked around and almost all the volunteers were older women, grandmothers like me. In this society, where adults of working age have less leisure time than in any other advanced country, the grandmothers have become the custodians of grassroots politics. We may not be tending our grandchildren one on one but we are tending all of their future.
When the next election rolls around, if a grandmother knocks on your door, she will listen to your concerns. She will show you that she cares. And she will share with you the wisdom she has gained through a lifetime of mistakes, and help us avoid the kinds of mistakes that could kill us all. Because she knows that we all are her grandchildren now.