Thursday, October 04, 2007

Wisdom and Age

When my seventy-seven year old mother met with an accident recently and fractured her hip, during one of her "dark nights of the soul", she expressed the view that people like her had already lived out their productive lives and had nothing more to contribute to society. She recalled that in the olden days, people would live a much shorter life span and did not usually have to contend with the specter of degenerative diseases that would render them increasingly frail and dependant on others. She also mentioned that once one got to that point, it was a frightening situation because while some people were lucky to be well taken care of, many others were treated callously as burdens to feed.

Since then I have been thinking a lot about what it means to be productive. If my mother in her late seventies worries about being productive, I need to worry too. Often as I buy and read business magazines at airports and railway stations, I note that one of the main features of today's knowledge based economy is that people who are needed are often those who are young and who bring with them the latest technologies and domain knowledge that are needed today. It is of course another matter that today's young people become tomorrow's middle aged and today's emerging platform is tomorrow's obsolesce. I noted though that in the manufacturing industry, experience was valued above youth perhaps because technology does not evolve as rapidly there as else where. The trick is in reinventing ourselves in every age, every decade, so that we remain forever productive.

But how to define productivity? Is it all about moving our hands and feet and being seen to be visibly agile and mobile? I think that is how youth defines it - speed is every thing and you ought always to be visible as doing some thing. Being productive is being active; no being productive is being pro active, being there before any one else has got there. Of course these attributes are important- doing the right thing at the right time at the right pace is the sina qua non of being strategic.

There is a trait, a quality that we use every day of our lives but it is one that is forever hiding itself in the shadows. It is called wisdom. Wisdom is never a part of the curriculum of any management school or institution but can only be learnt on the job as one goes through life in its many shades. And the longer one lives, the longer one in engaged with the world, the sharper its nuances as it is expressed out and lived out in life's diverse situations.

Some times, I feel that we haven't quite learnt to value and evaluate the weight of experience, wisdom and the value addition that it provides. And so our propensity often to sniff at the gifts they bring and the insights they offer as the obsolete thinking of outdated senile minds. Because their understanding and practice is often not expressed in the vocabulary and idiom of the here and now jargon, we often look upon their opinion and insight with a dismissive air.

In the Bible, particularly the Old Testament, old age is a blessing. To die “full of years” is the fondest wish of biblical characters. Zechariah 8:4-5 shares a vision of the new kingdom of God in which those of old age sit on the streets of the New Jerusalem. They carry canes, but the youthful children play around them. The elderly are respected members of this new society. Interestingly, in such prophetic passages the benefits of old age are never “explained;” they are “assumed.” The prophets share other such concerns for the elderly. Isaiah 46:4 reads, “To your old age I am the one who will look after you; to gray hair, I will carry you, I myself have created you and will lift you up; I myself will carry you and deliver you.

The most venerated role posited to the elderly can be found in the book of Proverbs. Old age and wisdom are synonymous. Proverbs 22:17-24:22 contains a vast collection of sayings that instruct the young to obey their elders and to always deal wisely with the elderly. Negatively the same assertion is made in Proverbs 30:17, where the young are scolded for their foolishness if they do not “heed the education of the elderly.

Similarly through out the Book of Proverbs we find that being wise is not about having knowledge per se but rather about an individual's response to that knowledge. And in his opening chapter Solomon tells us what a fitting response looks like: "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and discipline" (1:7). Wisdom is thus rooted in relationship; or, to turn a contemporary aphorism on its head, "It's not about what you know; it's about who you know." To be wise is first and foremost to surrender in awe before the God of the universe, our Creator and Redeemer. Furthermore, wisdom is personified—wisdom actually speaks—in Proverbs. Wisdom declares, "I, wisdom, dwell together with prudence; I possess knowledge and discretion. To fear the LORD is to hate evil; I hate pride and arrogance, evil behavior and perverse speech" (8:12, 13). Wisdom continues, "I love those who love me, and those who seek me find me" (v. 17).

Wisdom and its importance cannot be ever weighed on a scale. Its power is subtle and its influence nuanced. It cannot easily be captured on balance sheets, nor can its astuteness be easily encashed as dividends. Yet this is the one commodity that our senior citizens have in abundance and on tap and yet a resource we rarely remember to tap as we busy ourselves paying obeisance at the altar of youth. The spring fountains of youth are indeed enthralling but can they match the depth of eyes and ears that having seen off spring have witnessed, summer, autumn and now winter?

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