Aging And Wisdom

Today Ayi Ezekiel one of my dear friends celebrated her birthday. I had mine just a view days ago. My mother, sister and two of my brothers just had their birth days within the last two weeks. In as much as we love these yearly happenings, most of us have not really understood what life is all about. There is an assumption that as we get older, we will get wiser. Am afraid this is not true. We find ourselves leaving the responsibility for growth in t the hands of God or mother nature. Wisdom does not always accompany age, some times age comes alone.
When we are young, aging seems to be something that happens to the elderly. But it does happen to us all whether we like it or not. Many try to resist it to their own dismay and feeling of helplessness  the unstoppable force of mortality dragging every one from cradle to the grave. All we can do is to embrace it, roll with it and make maximum use of the time we have to spend here. What ever we do and how ever we try, the fact is we are going to get older. And this process does seem to speed up as we get older.
If we must grow older you need to do nothing but if we must grow wiser, we need to do something. When teaching children about wisdom in church we define it as "knowing what to do and doing it at the right time". What should you be doing at this point in your life. You have to place your self under subjection and tell yourself "I must do this". I must is the language of high flyers.
Jesus said "I must do the work of Him that sent me"
Also you must learn from your past mistakes and triumphs. It was Plato that said "the unexamined life is not worth living". If you want to become wise you must be a student of life. Though I do not subscribe to the saying that experience is the best teacher, I think experience is a good teacher if you show up for class.
If you want to consciously become wiser in life you should also learn from other people's experiences. You don't need to do it to learn from it. I know what it means to be a man that is polygamous. I don't have to experience such pain, I learnt from my father. I think apart from successful people holding seminars, failures need to hold seminars too. So they can tell us how they wasted their lives and how we should not end up where they are. Reading is also a good way to glean wisdom from other people's experiences.

Arnold Schwarzenegger

Remember that there are things you can do today, that you can't do tomorrow therefore put an "I MUST" tag on your life. When I look at my parents I understand the reality of the words "how time flies". When I see a child that was born when I was already in secondary school now preparing for SSCE then I understand the truth in the words "No time to waste". When I see the obituary of a man who did nothing meaningful with the long life he was given, then I understand the lie in the words "A life well spent"
The value of life lies not in the length of days we live put the use we make of it.
Live longer and become wiser