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Robert Bly

Age does not necessarily bring wisdom. The sure thing that comes of getting older is more experience, but then what’s the value of increased experience in the realm of doing little?

What makes a person wise seems best put as Robert Bly passed along to me. Goes like this. “In the old days a wise man was not an important person. He took any small task that came along. Essentially he did nothing, like this walnut tree.”

I’ve returned to this thought many times, often hoping I could do nothing as well as a tree does.   Experience is what it is, so I’d guess wisdom might be some form of trying to make sense of our experiences. That make sense? But it’s not just us, you or I as individuals, is it? We get plenty of push to tweak our understanding. Parents are early pushers of do and don’t, often helpful as in “HOT - don’t touch!” “Stay out of the street.”

Of course there’s parental social pressure, too, such as having to kiss the elderly aunt who smells like old clothes stored with moth (pity the poor males of the species) balls. But it’s not long before outside pressures of gang-peer-local provide more pushes. It’s my guess that even the most independent among us is far more shaped and moved by peer forces (and fear) than we care to acknowledge. But so what? If it’s in the background and we can’t change it then why fuss about it? Maybe (and I mean this only tentatively) being a bit aware helps promote wisdom rather than the wishful.  

Wanted or not, expansion follows. You’ve likely been in innocent conversation about azaleas or hamburgers when POOM! From nowhere launches an angry outburst about someone/something. These days Trump’s a pretty reliable source of explosive fuel, but exes, in-laws, bosses and so on make a good showing. If you’re fortune favored as I’ve been to have been personally involved as a grenade thrower you may have discovered these swift moves of mood and topic are tied to other behaviors, could say private habits. SO? Well, nothing more than awareness that no amount of reason or argument matters when a mood swing tosses a bomb. The person launching often has very little reason for their sudden burst of anger, which will be justified and enjoyed to full effect.

From my point of view, rather than wishing the other party didn’t toss discussion disrupting bombs the wiser step is reckon where the blast originated and move along, sometimes quitting the field so the one tossing grenades can toss away to heart’s content. Avoiding irrational argument is a wise course of action, or at least one that wastes less of your time on futile effort. If you must then you must, but many a time it’s best to depart the field leaving hopeless debate to those best equipped in that area.  

I say what I do based on upon-a-time having been much devoted to gory battle. A past slight, offense or issue would arise and out came my nukes. I doubt others were entertained by my practice of never surrendering, especially to a non-present opponent. A year on and I’d still find fuel for a fresh uprising of damning ire. I’d battle into eternity to doom and damn an enemy before finally burying them, sometimes to be dug up to be diced and killed once again. How experience with futile habits eventually led to a touch of poise is a mystery I can’ explain or guide any other to find. Maybe I just got tired of the endless arms race of mental war. It was tiring.

Also accomplished little. Life got easier-better without it. So here I am with a potential one percent level of possible wisdom and feeling that’s good enough for me. Stop while ahead.   But wait. Isn’t wisdom something we should value and aspire to? I suppose, but if there is any wisdom out there I suspect it has little practical value except for helping some individuals keep a slightly steadier footing. Look at the word and rocketed bombs flying around.

Where might wisdom enter there? Nowhere. Anger, rage and victimhood are simply too powerful and satisfying for mood-swinging combatants to consider, much less give up. You and I being wisely rational makes no difference to those hooked on tumult. I who took proud comfort keeping a fiery frenzy going a year or more am, like most of us, a greenhorn rookie compared to the blood rushes of satisfaction experienced by those able with ease to dip back decades, generations or epochs to wave the banners of bitter ends. So now you see revealed where I was going.

No amount of wisdom or poise reaches or will alter the path of those salvation bent on accomplishing their grand purpose and perfect design. Being wise and reasonable doesn’t stop bullets or pull bombs off course to detonate harmlessly in a no-people place. The rush to infernal glory is too powerfully pleasing to ignore. Individuals fall under the spell of glorious martyrdom, but so has large segments of entire cultures.  

No, I repeat, no amount of happy thought deters the angry, raging victim mind. Causes large or small will suffice to set a surge in motion from perceived personal snub to suspected social calamity. Bang the drum. Silence, so said, is complicity in whatever injustice the more just bring to focus. What day of the week is it in the metric freedom calendar in the year of Foibles Foiled For Good?

The chants of the righteous (does sound a bit religious, doesn’t it) will cast into the darkness the vilest of the evil, even if they tried in wicked desperation to hide in open sight ‘mongst the ill ranks of detestable supremacist lovers of nature and innocent looking watchers of the avian heavens. They cannot hide. Flush them out. Grind them from existence. The white-throated sparrow needs fixing today, the deer of snow-tail needs reckoning as does the formerly great, now big, pale carnivore fish no longer called a shark because all to be seen are minimized minnows.