Everyday Canvas

Gaining Wisdom

“The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.”
Wallace Stegner, The Spectator Bird
If you agree with the quote, in what ways is the scar tissue is mistaken for wisdom? If you don’t agree, from where do you think wisdom in life is gained?

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I have to say wisdom or callus depends on the person. Some people turn into pessimists with a negativistic outlook on life. They automatically assume nothing will work out at the end for themselves or others. They love other negative thinkers like themselves, and they try to make the positive thinkers accept their ways and be like them. They do not easily forgive others, and others’ successes and good outcomes they give to luck. Worse yet, they think they have gained the greatest wisdom possible due to having gone through a bad experience, and they are there to sermonize anyone who happens to be passing by.

Others, however, gain insight into themselves and the human nature as a result and learn to adapt to changes in a positive way. I don’t know if there’s a statistic as to what percentage of which group reacts to the life’s lessons, but in my experience, the first group weighs more heavily.

Although a life’s wisdom can show up in a person through numerous ways, the real road to gaining wisdom, I believe, is done by people who go after wisdom consciously. This may be done by living the life consciously and through astute observation and not just by living it through emotions or cultural habits and beliefs. This may also mean a person of wisdom reads a lot in different areas, digests what he reads, and is aware of what happens inside himself under any given situation. I suspect, most of the time, a life’s wisdom shows up in the shape of empathy, which is a lot different than sympathy; however, empathy and sympathy are the subjects that deserve their own entry.


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PROMPT: The Sunday News! Share with us some good news that's happening in your area, or give us an opinion on some current events from the past week.

We had a hurricane hitting our area, so not that much good news there. Yesterday, we went to Publix for the first time. Some of its shelves were still empty.

To the right of our house, new neighbors moved in a week before the hurricane hit. They were all shaken up and didn’t know what to do as they were from Minnesota and were--earlier--congratulating themselves for skipping the snow shoveling for the rest of their lives. We tried to help. They seem to be really nice people. My good news is meeting them.

Another good news is that our street didn’t suffer much damage, only minimal, which might happen during any electrical storm. Also, our electric company, FPL, deserves major kudos for being possibly the best in the world. We never lost electricity during the storm, and in our town, those who lost electricity got it back within a couple of days, mostly.