Wisdom

This from Rachel Remen:

“Learning from life takes time.  I rarely recognize life’s wisdom at the time it is given.  Sometimes I am too distracted by something else that has caught my wandering eye, and not every gift of wisdom comes nicely gift-wrapped.  I have often received such a gift only many years after it was offered.  Sometimes I needed to receive other things first, to live through other experiences in order to be ready.”

This identifies two hurdles to wisdom.  First, wisdom doesn’t always come packaged with a big “WISDOM” label in bold red letters on it.  Sometimes wisdom may arrive in a passing observation, or it may even arrive looking a whole lot like a problem.  I just may not recognize wisdom for what it is.  Second, I may need to collect a few more additional bits of information for it to all fall together and make sense.  That is, I may just not have all the pieces for the puzzle.

In all this I am reminded of this from Justice Felix Frankfurter: “Wisdom too often never somes, so one ought not to reject it merely because it comes too late.”