Older and Wiser?

Yesterday, the New York Times magazine was devoted to a subject that, in coming years, will be exceeded in its prevalence only by its tedium: the aging of the Baby Boom generation and how that great mass of people born from 1946 to 1964 or so are redefining age just as they redefined youth oh so many years ago.

I found the articles about waning sexual desire, memory and muscle loss, and so on pretty boring, which admittedly, may be something of a defense mechanism on my part. I was, though, fascinated in a piece by a guy named Stephen Hall which explored the tie between age and wisdom, and connection that, in some part, anyway, we seem to take or less for granted.

Hall pointed out, however, that just getting old is no guarantee that a person will wise up. (My dad had a tape dispenser on his desk that captured this well, I think. It read, “We grow too soon old and too late smart.”)

Apparently, what experts on wisdom believe, says Hall, is that wise people “learn from previous negative experiences. They are able to step outside themselves and assess a troubling situation with calm reflection. They recast a crisis as a problem to be addressed, a puzzle to be solved. They take action in situations they can control and accept the inability to do so when matters are outside their control.”

Wanting to know where I stand in terms of wisdom (I’m trained as a philosopher to love wisdom, after all), I took the wisdom scorecard and scored a 3.9 out of 5, meaning, according to the scale, I have relatively moderate wisdom, just under a 4.0, which would be relatively high wisdom.

I suppose if I were a wiser person who was able to recast a crisis as a problem to be solved and accept the inability to do so in matters outside my control, I’d be more sanguine about these results.