Maya Angelou was, in my opinion, a woman of great wisdom. She was a creative whose life was layered with multiple journeys. Interestingly enough, the first of her journeys started when she was 7 years of age and was raped by a family friend. When questioned about the rape, she told who he was. The perpetrator was subsequently killed. Young Maya decided that her voice caused the man’s death and therefore decided she would not ever speak again, and she didn’t for six years.
That incident was the first of many tough occurrences in her life that she had to learn from. She rose out of every circumstance to become a poet, a published author, an entertainer, a calypso dancer for a while, an actor and a sought-after speaker. Most notably, she was the first woman of color to have been commissioned to write a poem for President Bill Clinton’s first inauguration in 1993—“On the Pulse of the Morning.”
As she evolved and became the icon that she was, Angelou saw wisdom not as a destination, but as a process of continuous learning and improvement, and she further espoused that wisdom was connected to resilience, and felt that life’s challenges and “defeats” are necessary elements for self-discovery and strength.
As seasoned citizens, we are in an interesting position; we operate in a few layers on the road to acquiring wisdom. First, we have been blessed to have lived long lives, and as a result, through mistakes, in judgment, in relationships (unless you are one of the ones who were able to fight through the hard times and are happily still in the same marriage with your original partner you’ve been with for the past 30/40 years), with our friends, and with family including our children, we’ve learned a lot.
Yet, we are oftentimes castigated for aging!! We have experienced losses, both physical and emotional. Many times we’ve had to learn to live with our mistakes—to essentially, “just get over things,” for which there is no fix. It is that part of life that we know cannot be undone. And yet many times there’s no real appreciation for what we have learned.
John Henrik Clarke, another brilliant Black man, so ahead of his time, was the son of sharecroppers. Born in 1915 in Alabama, after a brutal upbringing himself, Clarke ended up as a prominent historian, and was an activist and key figure in the Black Power movement and a leader in the Pan Africanism movement. If you do not know about him, I strongly encourage all to look up some of his powerful speeches. In the midst of his teachings, it was clear that his view on wisdom was that it was a crucial element for self-emancipation and he connected wisdom to understanding history and recognizing the power of knowledge. A key theme in Clarke’s ideas was that true wisdom empowers people to take control of their own destiny.
We have learned from these and other predecessors that we just don’t wake up one day and find wisdom sitting on our doorstep waiting for the chance to leap into our brains. We have to pay some dues, which sometimes leave scars (some visible, but most invisible). And after the scars heal, and we’ve emptied our pockets paying for our mistakes, it is the wisdom that you “earn” from those mistakes, errors, and mis-judgments.
It’s most important to realize that we should not waste our time lamenting over the mistakes and poor judgment calls. Instead, redirect the focus on the lessons learned; then we can see the seeds of wisdom begin to take hold. With more wisdom comes greater confidence, a self-assurance that was once lacking, along with a greater understanding of self.
For too long we stay focused on the issues that serve as setbacks and as such, lose the lesson. Wisdom comes at a price.
It is our experiences and learning transformed to wisdom that we bring to every table everywhere we go. This is what society fails to realize, every time insensitive jokes are made, every time we don’t appropriately honor our elders, or a family member makes negative commentary about our age, indicating we are now “too old” to be involved in family decisions…every time the younger men and women within a group we are in refuses to acknowledge our contribution….
We see these scenarios all around us. But as seniors, on our worst day, we are NOT defeated. We are on another leg of our journey, for which if we are living, then wisdom we are gaining.
